Thinking Positive: The Effect of Emotional Context on Respiratory Sensory Gating

Abstract

Respiratory sensory gating function has been found decreased by induced negative emotional stimulation in healthy adults. The increased ratio of the respiratory‐related evoked potentials (RREP) N1 peak amplitude for the second occlusion (S2) versus the first occlusion (S1), S2/S1, is indicative of decreased central neural gating mechanism. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that positive emotional context would enhance respiratory sensory gating function in healthy individuals.We tested respiratory sensory gating in a group of healthy individuals by the paired inspiratory occlusion paradigm of two transient obstructions of 150 milliseconds (msec) with 500 msec interval under both pleasant and neutral emotional contexts. The S2/S1 amplitude in the pleasant context and the neutral context were 0.57 and 0.45, respectively. There was a significant decrease in the S2/S1 ratio under the pleasant context (p < .05). After post‐hoc analysis, there was a significant decrease in S2 N1 peak amplitude in the pleasant compared to neutral context (p < .05).Our results demonstrated that positive emotional context enhances brain inhibitory mechanisms by filtering out repetitive respiratory stimuli. Further investigation on how positive emotional context modulates respiratory sensation in clinical patients is necessary.Support or Funding InformationMOST 103‐2420‐H‐182 ‐003 ‐MY2 CMRPD1B0332