Background: This study offers a robust framework for the classification of autonomic signals into five affective states during the picture viewing. To this end, the following emotion categories studied: five classes of the arousal-valence plane (5C), three classes of arousal (3A), and three categories of valence (3V). For the first time, the linguality information also incorporated into the recognition procedure. Precisely, the main objective of this paper was to present a fundamental approach for evaluating and classifying the emotions of monolingual and bilingual college students. Methods: Utilizing the nonlinear dynamics, the recurrence Quantification measures of the wavelet coefficients extracted. To optimize the feature space, different feature selection approaches, including generalized discriminant Analysis (GDA), principal component Analysis (PCA), kernel PCA, and linear discriminant Analysis (LDA), were examined. Finally, considering linguality information, the classification was performed using a probabilistic neural network (PNN). Results: Using LDA and the PNN, the highest recognition rates of 95. 51%, 95. 7%, and 95. 98% were attained for the 5C, 3A, and 3V, respectively. Considering the linguality information, a further improvement of the classification rates accomplished. Conclusion: The proposed methodology can provide a valuable tool for discriminating affective states in practical applications within the area of human-computer interfaces.