Emotion assessment plays a vital role in understanding and enhancing various aspects of human life, from mental well-being and social interactions to decision-making processes. Electrodermal Activity (EDA) is widely used for emotion assessment, as it is highly sensitive to sympathetic nervous system activity. While numerous existing approaches are available for EDA-based emotion assessment, they often fall short in capturing the dynamic non-linear variations and time-varying characteristics of EDA. These limitations hinder their effectiveness in accurately classifying emotional states along the Arousal and Valence dimensions. This study aims to address these shortcomings by introducing Transition Network Analysis (TNA) as a novel approach to EDA-based emotion assessment.

To explore the dynamic non-linear variations in EDA and their impact on the classification of Arousal and Valence dimensions, we decomposed EDA data into its phasic and tonic components. The phasic information is represented over a transition network. From the transition network, we extracted seven features. These features were subsequently used for classification purposes employing four different machine learning classifiers: logistic regression, multi-layer perceptron, random forest, and support vector machine (SVM). The performance of each classifier was evaluated using Leave-One-Subject-Out cross-validation. The study evaluated the performance of these classifiers in characterizing emotional dimensions.

The results of this research reveal significant variations in Degree Centrality and Closeness Centrality within the transition network features, enabling effective characterization of Arousal and Valence dimensions. Among the classifiers, the SVM achieved F1 scores of 71% and 72% for Arousal and Valence classification, respectively.

This study holds significant implications as it not only enhances our understanding of EDA's non-linear dynamics but also demonstrates the potential of TNA in addressing the limitations of existing techniques for EDA-based emotion assessment. The findings open exciting opportunities for the advancement of wearable EDA monitoring devices in naturalistic settings, bridging a critical gap in the field of affective computing. Furthermore, this research underlines the importance of recognizing the limitations in current EDA-based emotion assessment methods and suggests an innovative path forward in the pursuit of more accurate and comprehensive emotional state classification.