Beyond Static Representations: Learning Electroencephalogram Spatiotemporal Dynamics for Enhanced Emotion Recognition

Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based emotion recognition plays a pivotal role in brain-computer interfaces and mental health monitoring. However, conventional approaches often neglect the intrinsic spatial correlations among EEG channels and fail to effectively model both global temporal dependencies and the continuity of neural oscillations. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Dynamic Spatial Embedding and Temporal Attention Mamba (DSE-TAM) framework. Our Dynamic Spatial Embedding (DSE) module leverages graph convolutional networks to dynamically capture inter-channel relationships, preserving spatial coherence in EEG representations. Subsequently, the Temporal Attention Mamba module integrates self-attention with state-space models to jointly optimize long-range temporal dependencies and smooth transition dynamics. Extensive experiments on 2 public benchmarks (DEAP and DREAMER) and an in-house CEED dataset demonstrate that DSE-TAM surpasses state-of-the-art methods, achieving accuracies of 79.75% (arousal) and 78.27% (valence) on DEAP, 80.55% (arousal) and 83.91% (valence) on DREAMER, and 73.75% (3-class) on CEED. These results validate the framework's efficacy in advancing EEG-based emotion decoding for brain-computer interfaces. The source code is available at https://github.com/Raizeroko/DSE-TAM.