Abstract
The temporal relationship between our conscious intentions to act and the action itself has been widely investigated. Previous research consistently shows that the motor intention enters awareness a few 100 ms before movement onset. As research in other domains has shown that most behavior is affected by the emotional state people are in, it is remarkable that the role of emotional states on intention awareness has never been investigated. Here we tested the hypothesis that positive and negative affects have opposite effects on the temporal relationship between the conscious intention to act and the action itself. A mood induction procedure that combined guided imagery and music listening was employed to induce positive, negative, or neutral affective states. After each mood induction session, participants were asked to execute voluntary self-paced movements and to report when they formed the intention to act. Exposure to pleasant material, as compared to exposure to unpleasant material, enhanced positive affect and dampened negative affect. Importantly, in the positive affect condition participants reported their intention to act earlier in time with respect to action onset, as compared to when they were in the negative or in the neutral affect conditions. Conversely the reported time of the intention to act when participants experienced negative affect did not differ significantly from the neutral condition. These findings suggest that the temporal relationship between the conscious intention to act and the action itself is malleable to changes in affective states and may indicate that positive affect enhances intentional awareness.
Highlights
A key feature of voluntary movements is the conscious experience of the intention to act, which can be described as the feeling that we are planning to do something (Haggard, 2005)
While we provide evidence that positive affect influences awareness of motor intentions, our hypothesis that negative affect would narrow attentional breadth toward inner intentional states was not confirmed by our data
This study was the first to show that intentional awareness is influenced by the affective state participants are in
Summary
A key feature of voluntary movements is the conscious experience of the intention to act, which can be described as the feeling that we are planning to do something (Haggard, 2005). It was found that intentions were reported by the Positive affect enhances intention awareness subjects ∼200 ms before the onset of the actual movement, and up to ∼2 s after the onset of movement-related brain potentials, such as the readiness potential (Shibasaki and Hallett, 2006) Both the validity of the W-moment as a reliable measure of the timing of the intention and the interpretation of the readiness potential as reflecting motor preparation have been criticized (Gomes, 1998; Trevena and Miller, 2010; Schurger et al, 2012), following studies have replicated the main finding (Haggard and Eimer, 1999; Soon et al, 2008; Rigoni et al, 2013). Awareness of the motor intention presumably arises when neural activity in specific brain circuits – including the premotor cortex, the supplementary motor areas, and the posterior parietal cortex (Lau et al, 2004; Desmurget and Sirigu, 2009) – exceeds an individual’s threshold level, and only after specific movement-related brain processes occurred unconsciously
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