Subject Identity Confounds qEEG Emotion Recognition on DEAP and DREAMER

Quantitative EEG features such as frontal alpha asymmetry, spectral ratios and signal-complexity measures are often presented as interpretable biomarkers of emotion. Such claims require the markers to generalize across individuals, yet common evaluation protocols allow overlapping epochs and recordings from the same participants to appear in both training and test sets. We re-evaluated qEEG-based valence and arousal recognition on DEAP and DREAMER under trial-grouped, participant-independent, within-participant and cross-dataset protocols. Epoch-pooled evaluation on DEAP gave ROC-AUC values of 0.689 for valence and 0.711 for arousal, whereas participant-independent evaluation of the same features and model returned 0.493 and 0.447. Grouping epochs by trial accounted for about 0.06 of that difference and separating participants for a further 0.13 to 0.17. The same features identified participants with accuracy of 0.998 on DEAP and 0.891 on DREAMER, and a predictor that used no EEG, assigning each trial its participant’s training-set positive rate, accounted for 42 to 84 percent of the above-chance discrimination of the epoch-pooled model. Emotion-related effects were reproducible within participants on DEAP but close to zero on DREAMER, and their direction reversed for about 40 percent of features across participants. In a matched participant-level comparison using a single fixed estimator in both arms, training on a participant’s own data improved DEAP valence by 0.092 AUC (95% CI 0.029 to 0.157, Holm-adjusted $p=0.042$) and gave no reliable benefit for DEAP arousal or for either DREAMER target. Across the channels shared by the two datasets, per-feature arousal effect sizes correlated moderately, although no individual feature reached false-discovery-rate significance in both datasets. Pooled qEEG emotion-recognition scores can therefore reflect participant-specific recording structure rather than transferable affective information. Population-level claims require participant-independent evaluation, while personalization should be considered only where stable within-person effects are demonstrated.