Virtual reality-induced emotion recognition with deep learning-based multimodal physiological feature fusion.

Objective: Recognizing emotions objectively and accurately remains challenging because of the limited ecological validity, informational incompleteness, and constrained model performance of conventional approaches. This study addresses these limitations holistically by investigating a novel framework that integrates ecologically valid virtual reality (VR) for emotion elicitation with deep learning-based multimodal physiological signal fusion. Methods: An immersive VR environment was developed to effectively elicit three target emotional states: positive, neutral, and negative. Synchronized physiological signals-electroencephalography (EEG), electrocardiography (ECG), and galvanic skin response (GSR)-were recorded from 20 healthy participants alongside subjective self-assessment data. After preprocessing and feature extraction, a nested cross-validation procedure was employed to prevent data leakage: within each of the five folds, feature selection (one-way repeated-measures ANOVA, Results: Subjective evaluation results confirmed the effectiveness of VR-induced emotion elicitation. At the group level, one-way repeated-measures analysis of variance revealed significant main effects of emotional states ( Conclusion: This study validates that integrating an ecologically valid VR emotion elicitation paradigm with a multimodal PCA-LSTM fusion model effectively enhances the objectivity and accuracy of emotion recognition. The proposed framework provides an effective solution to overcome the bottlenecks of ecological validity and quantification precision in traditional methods, demonstrating preliminary application potential in intelligent human-computer interaction and mental-health monitoring domains.