Instantaneous estimation of momentary affective responses using neurophysiological signals and a spatiotemporal emotional intensity regression network

•An instant-click recording system was designed to obtain momentary affective labels.•An EEG-based spatiotemporal emotional intensity regression network was proposed.•The model uses cross-cortical-region attention to fuse global affective information.•Frontal and temporal regions highly contribute to affective intensity variations.•Higher regression performance was observed for the happy and fear emotions. Previous studies in affective computing often use a fixed emotional label to train an emotion classifier with electroencephalography (EEG) from individuals experiencing an affective stimulus. However, EEGs encode emotional dynamics that include varying intensities within a given emotional category. To investigate these variations in emotional intensity, we propose a framework that obtains momentary affective labels for fine-grained segments of EEGs with human feedback. We then model these labeled segments using a novel spatiotemporal emotional intensity regression network (STEIR-Net). It integrates temporal EEG patterns from nine predefined cortical regions to provide a continuous estimation of emotional intensity. We demonstrate that the STEIR-Net outperforms classical regression models by reducing the root mean square error (RMSE) by an average of 4∼9 % and 2∼4 % for the SEED and SEED-IV databases, respectively. We find that the frontal and temporal cortical regions contribute significantly to the affective intensity's variation. Higher absolute values of the Spearman correlation coefficient between the model estimation and momentary affective labels under happiness (0.2114) and fear (0.2072) compared to neutral (0.1694) and sad (0.1895) emotions were observed. Besides, increasing the input length of the EEG segments from 4 to 20 s further reduces the RMSE from 1.3548 to 1.3188.