The Gastric Myoelectrical Activity Response To Emotional Stimuli

Abstract

Emotion research is a growing field for several decades and it is of special interest how emotional responses are modulating numerous diseases and psychiatric conditions. Research on animals and humans has shown the existence of gastrointestinal changes in response to stress, depression and fear; however, in the current emotional research state of art, the mainly used variables comprise electrodermal activity, cardiac function, facial EMG and respiration. In this study, 17 healthy subjects were exposed to positive, negative or neutral film clips, followed by a water load test after an overnight fast. The electrogastrogram, electroencephalogram, electrooculogram, electrocardiogram and one respiratory belt were used to measure brain and peripheral autonomic activity from our subjects. We found that the mechanical stimulation induced an increase in the 3cpm myoelectrical gastric activity in 70% of the participants (pvalue <0.05). As response to the emotional stimuli, 58% of the subjects presented an increase of the 3cpm activity when exposed to low intensity stimuli (p-value <0.01). There was no significant difference in the gastric activity between positive and negative film clips. The gastric activity suppression as a response to emotional-charged excerpts suggests a CNS to ENS inhibition, consistent with findings from animal models. Further analysis is necessary to evaluate the relationship between the electroencephalogram and gastric activity and to analyze the autonomic responses to the emotional stimuli.