Recently, physiological data such as electroencephalography (EEG) signals
have attracted significant attention in affective computing. In this context,
the main goal is to design an automated model that can assess emotional states.
Lately, deep neural networks have shown promising performance in emotion
recognition tasks. However, designing a deep architecture that can extract
practical information from raw data is still a challenge. Here, we introduce a
deep neural network that acquires interpretable physiological representations
by a hybrid structure of spatio-temporal encoding and recurrent attention
network blocks. Furthermore, a preprocessing step is applied to the raw data
using graph signal processing tools to perform graph smoothing in the spatial
domain. We demonstrate that our proposed architecture exceeds state-of-the-art
results for emotion classification on the publicly available DEAP dataset. To
explore the generality of the learned model, we also evaluate the performance
of our architecture towards transfer learning (TL) by transferring the model
parameters from a specific source to other target domains. Using DEAP as the
source dataset, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in performing
cross-modality TL and improving emotion classification accuracy on DREAMER and
the Emotional English Word (EEWD) datasets, which involve EEG-based emotion
classification tasks with different stimuli