Acute and long term aerobic exercise enhances emotion regulation: an EEG and machine learning study in young adults

Psychological emotions, as dynamic mental activities modulated by individual volition, are critical to well-being. This study investigates the impact of aerobic exercise on emotional regulation through EEG signal analysis.In an acute exercise experiment (n = 66, 30 exercise,15 M/15F vs. 36 control,19 M/17F), moderate-intensity aerobic activity significantly increased prefrontal alpha asymmetry during exposure to negative and neutral stimuli from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) (p < .05, Cohen’s d = 0.62), indicating a shift toward positive affective bias. For long-term effects, participants with sustained aerobic habits (n = 80) demonstrated significantly higher accuracy in the EEG-based classification of emotional states (SVM: 73.54%, AUC = 0.80) using α–β band features, compared to sedentary controls (p < .01). Our integrated EEG-based computational framework reveals that acute aerobic exercise rapidly modulates mood-related cortical activity (indexed by prefrontal alpha asymmetry), while habitual exercise is associated with refined neural tuning and efficiency in emotional processing (indexed by enhanced EEG pattern classification). These findings propose EEG-driven biomarkers for preventing negative emotions, offering practical strategies for mental health interventions.