We demonstrate how emotional valence influences the order-dependent structure of children's recognition memory: correct recall of a sequence of emotionally-valenced toys depended not just on the valence of a given toy itself, but also on the valence of the toys shown before and after it. Whilst standard psychological models confirm that order-dependence differs across an event (a set of toys shown in sequence), accuracy is low and the model does not reflect how memory for an emotional object influences others in the set. A classical tensor network model factoring in valence is able to achieve a 77.98\% accuracy in modelling the results of the study. While not strictly a ``quantum cognition'' model, this massive increase in accuracy shows the value of quantum-inspired methods for modelling order-dependent phenomena, such as emotional memory. Further, the task protocol we introduce presents a novel, real-world tool for exploring emotional temporal memory in children for analysis using classical and quantum-like models of cognition.
We demonstrate how emotional valence influences the order-dependent structure of children's recognition memory: correct recall of a sequence of emotionally-valenced toys depended not just on the valence of a given toy itself, but also on the valence of the toys shown before and after it. Whilst standard psychological models confirm that order-dependence differs across an event (a set of toys shown in sequence), accuracy is low and the model does not reflect how memory for an emotional object influences others in the set. A classical tensor network model factoring in valence is able to achieve a 77.98% accuracy in modelling the results of the study. While not strictly a ``quantum cognition'' model, this massive increase in accuracy shows the value of quantum-inspired methods for modelling order-dependent phenomena, such as emotional memory. Further, the task protocol we introduce presents a novel, real-world tool for exploring emotional temporal memory in children for analysis using classical and quantum-like models of cognition.
Speech emotion recognition (SER) remains fragile in real-world conditions because emotional cues are subtle, speaker-dependent, and easily confounded by recording variability, while high-performing deep models typically rely on large and carefully curated training sets. Quantum machine learning offers an alternative way to introduce nonlinear correlation modeling with compact modules, yet existing quantum SER studies remain limited, and the impact of circuit structure is not well understood. This paper presents HQTN-SER, a hybrid quantum-classical framework that investigates how quantum tensor network connectivity can support SER under small-qubit settings. HQTN-SER introduces (i) an MPS-inspired quantum tensor network module that enforces structured interactions to model correlations in speech representations with a small number of trainable parameters, and (ii) a fusion strategy that combines quantum measurement features with a learned classical latent embedding for end-to-end emotion classification. We evaluate HQTN-SER on three public benchmarks (RAVDESS, SAVEE, and MDER) under a unified preprocessing and training protocol. The proposed model achieves test accuracies of 80.09\% on RAVDESS, 78.12\% on SAVEE, and 73.51\% on MDER, with corresponding macro-F1 scores of 0.8012, 0.7826, and 0.7351, respectively. The model also exhibits stable convergence while using only three or four qubits, suggesting that MPS-inspired circuit structure can be an effective and hardware-aware design choice for quantum-assisted SER. These results provide a compact experimental baseline for studying structured quantum modules in affective computing.
Abstract This study explores Quantum AI’s potential in enhancing Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) systems. Our primary objective is to evaluate the performance of quantum-inspired algorithms compared to classical machine-learning approaches in accurately identifying and classifying emotions from speech signals. We hypothesise that quantum computing techniques can improve the efficiency and accuracy of emotion recognition, particularly in handling complex, highdimensional acoustic data. We developed a hybrid quantum-classical model that combines quantum-inspired neural networks with traditional feature extraction techniques. Our approach utilises quantum circuits for data encoding and quantum variational algorithms for classification. We implemented quantum versions of support vector machines (QSVM) and quantum approximate optimisation algorithms (QAOA) for emotion classification tasks. These quantum methods were compared against a hybrid Convolutional Neural Network and Long Short Term (LSTM). The hybrid network is called a Convolutional Long Short Term network(CLSTM). The study employed a custom dataset for speech emotion recognition. We prepossessed the audio data to extract relevant acoustic features, including mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), pitch, and energy. In contrast, our implemented quantum-inspired model for this corpus showed lower performance, with the highest training accuracy of 30%, struggling with most emotions but performing best with ’Trust’. These varied results across different implementations suggest that while Quantum AI techniques show promise in advancing speech emotion recognition, their effectiveness may depend on the specific dataset, language, and model architecture used. Finally, the speed of a simulated quantum network is shown to outperform current methods in terms of matrix multiplication by leaps and bounds.
Quantum cognition is a scientific approach to cognitive phenomena which makes use of the mathematical formalism of quantum theory. Quantum interference effect constitutes one of this theory’s main tenets and has been repeatedly demonstrated experimentally, in the last decade, in adult subjects. In the present paper, we aim to demonstrate, for the first time, the existence of thequantum interference effect on children during an experiment involving an integration of cognition and emotion. Our positive results consolidate the presuppositions of quantum cognition, enlarging its field of application to children’s mental apparatus and evidence the important question to consider the quantum model in the current investigated question of the interaction of cognition and emotion in children at neurological and psychological levels.
Emotional cognition is nonlinear, probabilistic, and interdependent, making it hard to recreate human emotional intelligence in AI systems. The study offers the Quantum-Emotion Neural Network (QENN). This unique Quantum Physics-Inspired AI approach uses aspects of quantum mechanics such as superposition, entanglement, and quantum probability amplitudes in neural network design. Where regular models handle emotions as non-interacting or unchanging parts, QENN represents them using amplitude encoding and quantum-inspired neurons to allow all emotional states to be managed together. Training and evaluation of the model took place on the IndiComics Emotion (ICE) dataset, which has 17,340 multimodal instances over eight emotion classes-happy, Sad, Angry, Fearful, Disgust, Surprised, Neutral, and Mixed emotions. The tests showed QENN achieved better results than CNN and LSTM, with an accuracy of 93.8%, 93.5% precision, 92.9% recall, an F1-score of 93.2%, and an ROC-AUC of 95.8% overall. In contrast, traditional CNN and LSTM models had 84.7% and 85.3% accuracies, and their ROC-AUC was 87.2% and 88.5%, respectively. Evaluation with the confusion matrix showed that precision remained above 90% in all emotion types, even for complex ones like ‘Mixed.’ Also, the training-validation accuracy curves revealed excellent generalisation and limited overfitting, with a learning rate of 0.001 giving the most minor validation loss, equal to 0.21. These outcomes show that quantum-inspired solutions are robust and easy to understand for emotion modelling. This work proves that QENN is a critical step forward in making machines that understand emotions as people do.
This investigation presents a novel methodological framework for affective computing. Emotional processes exert substantial influence on cognitive decision-making mechanisms, brain-computer interface efficacy, and social intelligence paradigms, thereby establishing emotion recognition as a critical domain of scientific inquiry. Electroencephalographic (EEG) signals have garnered considerable scholarly attention due to their capacity to capture neurological activity with exceptional temporal resolution. However, the inherent complexity of these signals and significant inter-individual variability present substantial challenges in the development of accurate and generalizable computational models. To address these methodological limitations, this study proposes an innovative hybrid quantum-classical framework-the Quantum Deep Adaptation Network (QDAN)-for emotion recognition utilizing EEG signal analysis. This architectural approach strategically leverages the computational advantages inherent in quantum computing, particularly the fundamental quantum mechanical principles of superposition and entanglement, to enhance pattern recognition capabilities in high-dimensional EEG data representations. We employ sophisticated domain adaptation techniques to effectively mitigate variability across experimental sessions. The proposed methodological framework undergoes rigorous empirical validation utilizing the standardized SEED dataset. Experimental findings reveal significant performance heterogeneity across subjects and sessions, with the model achieving a maximum classification accuracy of 73.91 %. These results demonstrate the potential efficacy of quantum-enhanced computational approaches in addressing the complex challenges associated with EEG-based emotion recognition systems.
Emotion recognition seeks to identify a person’s state by examining signals such as facial expressions, speech, physiological signals and conversational content. Yet accurate emotion recognition presents obstacles because these signals can be complex, noisy, nonlinear and heavily affected by surrounding context. This paper investigates quantum-based representations combined with machine learning techniques to enhance emotion classification. The research examines emotion sources, including facial expressions, speech, EEG signals and conversational data. It explores how quantum-inspired techniques can merge with established deep learning methods to produce representations. The design presented fuses a neural network with a four qubit ZZFeatureMap component enabling the system to learn data from both conventional and quantum derived feature spaces. Experiments examined EEG segments for each participant and the system achieved average recognition rates of seventy nine point six percent for valence and eighty one point five percent for arousal across ten repeated trials. These findings show that quantum derived features can add information when combined with conventional deep learning methods. Nevertheless because experiments used simulated circuits the results do not prove a performance advantage over conventional techniques on actual quantum computers. The study also highlights difficulties such as quantum noise, computational scalability, experimental assessment, data privacy and real world deployment.