In this work, an analysis based on complex demodulation is proposed to classify dichotomous emotional states using Electrodermal activity (EDA) signals. For this, annotated happy and sad EDA is obtained from an online public database. The sympathetic activity indices, namely Time-varying (TVSymp) and Modified TVSymp, are computed from the reconstructed EDA signal. Further, the derivative of phasic EDA is calculated from the phasic component obtained using the convex optimization (cvxEDA) based EDA decomposition method. Five statistical features are computed from each index and used for the classification. The results of the classification indicate that these features are capable of differentiating happy and sad emotional states with 75% accuracy. This technique could be effective in the identification of clinical disorders associated with happy and sad emotional states. © 2022 European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) and IOS Press.