This study addresses the problem of classifying emotional words based on recorded electroencephalogram （EEG） signals by the single-trial EEG classification technique. Emotional two-character Chinese words are used as experimental materials. Positive words versus neutral words and negative words versus neutral words are classified, respectively, using the induced EEG signals. The method of temporally regularized common spatial patterns （TRCSP） is chosen to extract features from the EEG trials, and then single-trial EEG classification is achieved by linear discriminant analysis. Classification accuracies are between 55% and 65%. The statistical significance of the classification accuracies is confirmed by permutation tests, which shows the successful identification of emotional words and neutral ones, and also the ability to identify emotional words. In addition, 10 out of 15 subjects obtain significant classification accuracy for negative words versus neutral words while only 4 are significant for positive words versus neutral words, which demonstrate that negative emotions are more easily identified.
