From Neural Dynamics to Emotional Intelligence: A Quantum Physics-Inspired AI Framework Bridging Psychological Minds and Machine Learning Models

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%, $\mathbf{9 3. 5 \%}$ precision, $\mathbf{9 2. 9 \%}$ recall, an $\mathbf{F 1}$-score of $\mathbf{9 3. 2 \%}$, and an ROC-AUC of $\mathbf{9 5. 8 \%}$ 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 $\mathbf{9 0 \%}$ 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.