Abstract
It is well established that emotions are organized around two motivational systems: the defensive and the appetitive. Individual differences are relevant factors in emotional reactions, making them more flexible and less stereotyped. There is evidence that health professionals have lower emotional reactivity when viewing scenes of situations involving pain. The objective of this study was to investigate whether the rating of pictures of surgical procedure depends on their personal/occupational relevance. Fifty-two female Nursing (health discipline) and forty-eight Social Work (social science discipline) students participated in the experiment, which consisted of the presentation of 105 images of different categories (e.g., neutral, food), including 25 images of surgical procedure. Volunteers judged each picture according to its valence (pleasantness) and arousal using the Self-Assessment Manikin scale (dimensional approach). Additionally, the participants chose the word that best described what they felt while viewing each image (discrete emotion perspective). The average valence score for surgical procedure pictures for the Nursing group (M = 4.57; SD = 1.02) was higher than the score for the Social Work group (M = 3.31; SD = 1.05), indicating that Nursing students classified those images as less unpleasant than the Social Work students did. Additionally, the majority of Nursing students (65.4%) chose “neutral” as the word that best described what they felt while viewing the pictures. In the Social Work group, disgust (54.2%) was the emotion that was most frequently chosen. The evaluation of emotional stimuli differed according to the groups' personal/occupational relevance: Nursing students judged pictures of surgical procedure as less unpleasant than the Social Work students did, possibly reflecting an emotional regulation skill or some type of habituation that is critically relevant to their future professional work.
Highlights
It is believed that emotions are organized around two motivational systems, one appetitive and one defensive, which allows individuals to adequately interact with ongoing circumstances that either promote or threaten survival [1]
The mean valence obtained by Nursing students for the surgical images corresponded to "neutral" pictures, whereas the average score obtained by the Social Work group corresponded to "negative" images
According to the bidimensional organization of emotion, surgical procedure pictures were judged as less emotional by Nursing students compared to Social Work students
Summary
It is believed that emotions are organized around two motivational systems, one appetitive and one defensive, which allows individuals to adequately interact with ongoing circumstances that either promote or threaten survival [1]. The defensive system is activated in contexts involving threat, whereas the appetitive system is activated in contexts that promote survival (e.g., sustenance, procreation and nurturance). Lang et al developed a catalogue with hundreds of emotional and neutral pictures, the International Affective Picture System—IAPS (Center for the Study of Emotion and Attention [CSEA]) [7], and developed a scale, the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM), to evaluate the pleasure (hedonic valence) and the emotional arousal evoked when viewing these pictures [8]. The SAM has been used extensively to measure subjective responses to distinct emotional patterns evoked by pictures. The IAPS has been used in a variety of studies, including those involving clinical samples and studies probing the effects of distinct physiological conditions (e.g., sleep deprivation) on subjective ratings of emotional pictures
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