Recognizing emotions using biological brain signals requires accurate and efficient signal processing and feature extraction methods. Existing methods use several techniques to extract useful features from a fixed number of electroencephalography (EEG) channels. The primary objective of this study was to improve the performance of emotion recognition using brain signals by applying a novel and adaptive channel selection method that acknowledges that brain activity has a unique behavior that differs from one person to another and one emotional state to another. Moreover, we propose identifying epochs, which are the instants at which excitation is maximum, during the emotion to improve the system's accuracy. We used the zero-time windowing method to extract instantaneous spectral information using the numerator group-delay function to accurately detect the epochs in each emotional state. Different classification scheme were defined using QDC and RNN and evaluated using the DEAP database. The experimental results showed that the proposed method is highly competitive compared with existing studies of multi-class emotion recognition. The average accuracy rate exceeded 89%. Compared with existing algorithms dealing with 9 emotions, the proposed method enhanced the accuracy rate by 8%. Moreover, experiment shows that the proposed system outperforms similar approaches discriminating between 3 and 4 emotions only. We also found that the proposed method works well, even when applying conventional classification algorithms.