Considering Gut Biofeedback for Emotion Regulation

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of electrogastrography (EGG) as a novel biofeedback measure for emotion regulation, highlighting the gut's role in emotional prediction and raising fundamental questions about emotion understanding.

Contribution

It introduces electrogastrography as a new method for emotion inference and discusses its implications for human-computer interaction and emotion research.

Findings

EGG can potentially serve as a measure for human emotions

The gut's activity correlates with emotional states

Fundamental questions about emotion remain in debate

Abstract

Recent research in the enteric nervous system, sometimes called the second brain, has revealed potential of the digestive system in predicting emotion. Even though people regularly experience changes in their gastrointestinal (GI) tract which influence their mood and behavior multiple times per day, robust measurements and wearable devices are not quite developed for such phenomena. However, other manifestations of the autonomic nervous system such as electrodermal activity, heart rate, and facial muscle movement have been extensively used as measures of emotions or in biofeedback applications, while neglecting the gut. We expose electrogastrography (EGG), i.e., recordings of the myoelectric activity of the GI tract, as a possible measure for inferring human emotions. In this paper, we also wish to bring into light some fundamental questions about emotions, which are often taken for granted in the field of Human Computer Interaction, but are still a great debate in the fields of cognitive neuroscience and psychology.