Even if science explains that emotions are generated in the brain, as far as philosophy and literature, poetry and music are concerned, it is the heart which is the symbol and the icon of what we feel. A study carried out by a research team from the University of Pisa has demonstrated how the heart can be an actual gateway in the portrayal of emotions and that these can be portrayed one beat at a time through a mathematical algorithm. The research, developed within the European project PSYCHE, with the collaboration of the University of Essex (UK), Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), has been published in the Nature's journal, Scientific Reports.
The results obtained by the research team can have a notable impact in the field of medicine and in particular in psychiatry and psychophysiology: "With this study we have developed a mathematical algorithm which is able to provide a continuous evaluation of the emotional states by simply analyzing an electrocardiogram," explains Gaetano Valenza, Post-doc Researcher at the "E. Piaggio" Research Centre and the Department of Information Engineering at the University of Pisa, and Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School. "In practice, given certain cardiac dynamics it is possible to predict the next heartbeat and understand which emotion has been felt by the subject under observation."
This discovery follows the direction of the brain-heart axis studies investigated up to the present using various techniques, among which functional imaging. In this case, a simple ECG Holter monitor test would provide an innovative approach in the treatment of mental pathologies which use questionnaires and interviews as an aid to the clinic. The PSYCHE project, which began in Pisa five years ago, has worked directly on the study of machines capable of recognizing emotions and has already developed and tested a "smart T-shirt", integrated with sensors and electrodes, which is now able to continuously monitor the emotional state of psychiatric patients.
As well as Gaetano Valenza, the primary author of the research, the other authors are Enzo Pasquale Scilingo, coordinator of the PSYCHE team and Associate Professor of Bioengineering, Luca Citi, Lecturer in Computational Intelligence at the University of Essex, Colchester (UK), Antonio Lanatà, Post-doc Researcher at the "E. Piaggio" Research Centre and the Department of Information Engineering at the University of Pisa, Riccardo Barbieri, coordinator of the research team Harvard-MIT, Assistant Professor of Anaesthesia at the Neuroscience Statistics Research Laboratory, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA & Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, (USA).