In recent years, affective computing based on electroencephalogram (EEG) data has attracted increased attention. As a classic EEG feature extraction model, Granger causality analysis has been widely used in emotion classification models, which construct a brain network by calculating the causal relationships between EEG sensors and select the key EEG features. Traditional EEG Granger causality analysis uses the L2 norm to extract features from the data, and so the results are susceptible to EEG artifacts. Recently, several researchers have proposed Granger causality analysis models based on the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) and the L1/2 norm to solve this problem. However, the conventional sparse Granger causality analysis model assumes that the connections between each sensor have the same prior probability. This paper shows that if the correlation between the EEG data from each sensor can be added to the Granger causality network as prior knowledge, the EEG feature selection ability and emotional classification ability of the sparse Granger causality model can be enhanced. Based on this idea, we propose a new emotional computing model, named the sparse Granger causality analysis model based on sensor correlation (SC-SGA). SC-SGA integrates the correlation between sensors as prior knowledge into the Granger causality analysis based on the L1/2 norm framework for feature extraction, and uses L2 norm logistic regression as the emotional classification algorithm. We report the results of experiments using two real EEG emotion datasets. These results demonstrate that the emotion classification accuracy of the SC-SGA model is better than that of existing models by 2.46–21.81%.

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