Arousal Interpretation Research Articles

Effects of arousal reappraisal on the anxiety responses to stress: Breaking the cycle of negative arousal intensity and arousal interpretation.

Arousal reappraisal has been shown to be an effective strategy during stress to improve anxiety. However, the exact psychological mechanism through which arousal reappraisal improves anxiety is unknown. In a large, cross-sectional study (Study 1, N = 455) participants engaged in an acute psychological stress task and rated their levels of physiological arousal, cognitive anxiety, and somatic anxiety, and whether they perceived this physiological arousal, cognitive anxiety, and somatic anxiety as helpful or hurtful (i.e., interpretation). Structural equationmodels supported a previously hypothesized model demonstrating that higher levels of physiological arousal were interpreted more negatively and this negative interpretation was associated with higher levels of anxiety intensity and more negative interpretations of anxiety. In an independent sample (Study 2, N = 155), participants were randomly assigned to an arousal reappraisal intervention or control condition prior to engaging in the psychological stress task. Results indicated that arousal reappraisal resulted in more positive interpretations of physiological arousal and anxiety. Results also supported a previously hypothesized model demonstrating that arousal reappraisal 'broke' the connection between physiological arousal intensity and physiological arousal interpretation. The present studies suggest that arousal reappraisal could possibly be acting through improving interpretations of physiological arousal symptoms.

Disentangling interoceptive abilities in alexithymia

In recent years, research on interoceptive abilities (i.e., sensibility, accuracy, and awareness) and their associations with emotional experience has flourished. Yet interoceptive abilities in alexithymia—a personality trait characterized by a difficulty in the cognitive interpretation of emotional arousal, which impacts emotional experience—remain under-investigated, thereby limiting a full understanding of subjective emotional experience processing. Research has proposed two contrasting explanations thus far: in one model, the dimensions of interoceptive sensibility and accuracy in alexithymia would increase; in the other model, they would decrease. Surprisingly, the contribution of interoceptive awareness has been minimally researched. In this study (N = 182), the relationship between participants’ level of alexithymia and the three interoceptive dimensions was tested. Our results show that the higher the level of alexithymia is, the higher interoceptive accuracy and sensibility (R2 = 0.29 and R2 = 0.14); conversely, the higher the level of alexithymia is, the lower interoceptive awareness (R2 = 0.36). Moreover, an ROC analysis reveals that interoceptive awareness is the most accurate predictor of alexithymia, yielding over 92% accuracy. Collectively, these results support a coherent understanding of interoceptive abilities in alexithymia, whereby the dissociation of interoceptive accuracy and awareness may explain the underlying psycho-physiological mechanisms of alexithymia. A possible neurocognitive mechanism is discussed which suggests insurgence of psychosomatic disorders in alexithymia and related psychotherapeutic approaches.

Environmental enrichment and stereotypic behavior

ABSTRACTEnvironmental enrichment has been used as a control condition during experimental functional analysis assessments and as a procedure to decrease stereotypic behavior and other aberrant behavior. Interestingly, in some studies, environmental enrichment has been found to increase stereotyped behavior, rather than decreasing it. Currently, there is no cohesive explanation of why this may occur, and the aim of this paper is to explore some behavioral mechanisms that might explain this type of stereotyped behavior. Studies showing increased rates of stereotypic behavior under enriched environment conditions, and studies evaluating procedures to reduce this type of stereotypic behavior are reviewed. Although it cannot be determined empirically which mechanisms are responsible for this type of stereotypic behavior, potential mechanisms include complementarity of reinforcers, establishing operations, arousal interpretation, suppression and response allocation, respondent behavior, and schedule-induced behavior. The extent to which there is sufficient empirical evidence to favor one over the other is discussed.

Do Hearing Aids Improve Affect Perception?

Normal-hearing listeners use acoustic cues in speech to interpret a speaker's emotional state. This study investigates the effect of hearing aids on the perception of the emotion dimensions arousal (aroused/calm) and valence (positive/negative attitude) in older adults with hearing loss. More specifically, we investigate whether wearing a hearing aid improves the correlation between affect ratings and affect-related acoustic parameters. To that end, affect ratings by 23 hearing-aid users were compared for aided and unaided listening. Moreover, these ratings were compared to the ratings by an age-matched group of 22 participants with age-normal hearing.For arousal, hearing-aid users rated utterances as generally more aroused in the aided than in the unaided condition. Intensity differences were the strongest indictor of degree of arousal. Among the hearing-aid users, those with poorer hearing used additional prosodic cues (i.e., tempo and pitch) for their arousal ratings, compared to those with relatively good hearing. For valence, pitch was the only acoustic cue that was associated with valence. Neither listening condition nor hearing loss severity (differences among the hearing-aid users) influenced affect ratings or the use of affect-related acoustic parameters. Compared to the normal-hearing reference group, ratings of hearing-aid users in the aided condition did not generally differ in both emotion dimensions. However, hearing-aid users were more sensitive to intensity differences in their arousal ratings than the normal-hearing participants.We conclude that the use of hearing aids is important for the rehabilitation of affect perception and particularly influences the interpretation of arousal.

Pleasure, Arousal, Dominance: Mehrabian and Russell revisited

This paper presents a discursive review of the dimensions pleasure, arousal and dominance that Mehrabian and Russell developed in 1974 to assess environmental perception, experience, and psychological responses. Since then numerous researchers applied these dimensions to assess the experience of the physical environment and its perceived qualities. Although the dimensions appeared to be useful, there is a long-lasting debate going on among environmental psychologists about the interpretation of pleasure, arousal and dominance and its underlying mechanisms. Due to the lack of clarity researchers use different adjectives to describe environmental experiences, which makes any comparison between research findings difficult. This paper shows that the three dimensions can be linked to the current ABC Model of Attitudes: pleasure, arousal and dominance can be respectively related to affective, cognitive and conative responses, i.e. Affect, Cognition and Behaviour (ABC). In addition, connecting the three dimensions to the triad feeling, thinking and acting, can also help to improve our understanding, interpretation and measurement of pleasure, arousal and dominance. Based on this review, it is proposed to re-introduce the three dimensions and to replace the nowadays often used two dimensional model with pleasure and arousal by a three dimensional model, including dominance as a third dimension, to represent the complete range of human responses.

Modulation of tactile duration judgments by emotional pictures.

Judging the duration of emotional stimuli is known to be influenced by their valence and arousal values. However, whether and how perceiving emotion in one modality affects time perception in another modality is still unclear. To investigate this, we compared the influence of different types of emotional pictures—a picture of threat, disgust, or a neutral picture presented at the start of a trial—on temporal bisection judgments of the duration of a subsequently presented vibrotactile stimulus. We found an overestimation of tactile duration following exposure to pictures of threat, but not pictures of disgust (even though these scored equally high on arousal), in a short-range temporal bisection task (range 300/900 ms). Follow-up experiments revealed that this duration lengthening effect was abolished when the range to be bisected was increased (1000/1900 ms). However, duration overestimation was maintained in the short-range bisection task regardless of whether the interval between the visual and tactile events was short or long. This pattern is inconsistent with a general arousal interpretation of duration distortion and suggests that crossmodal linkages in the processing of emotions and emotional regulation are two main factors underlying the manifestation of crossmodal duration modulation.

Modulation of long-term memory by arousal in alexithymia: The role of interpretation

Moderate physiological or emotional arousal induced after learning modulates memory consolidation, helping to distinguish important memories from trivial ones. Yet, the contribution of subjective awareness or interpretation of arousal to this effect is uncertain. Alexithymia, which is an inability to describe or identify one’s emotional and arousal states even though physiological responses to arousal are intact, provides a tool to evaluate the role of arousal interpretation. Participants scoring high and low on alexithymia ( N = 30 each) learned a list of 30 words, followed by immediate recall. Participants then saw either an arousing (oral surgery) or neutral video (tooth brushing). Memory was tested 24-h later. Physiological response to arousal was comparable between groups, but subjective response to arousal was impaired in high alexithymia. Yet, delayed word recognition was enhanced by arousal regardless of alexithymia status. Thus, subjective response to arousal, i.e., cognitive appraisal, was not necessary for memory modulation to occur.

Cognitive biases in the interpretation of autonomic arousal: A test of the construal bias hypothesis

According to Bandura’s construal bias hypothesis, derived from social cognitive theory, persons with the same heightened state of autonomic arousal may experience either pleasant or deleterious emotions depending on the strength of perceived self-efficacy. The current study tested this hypothesis by proposing that college students’ preexisting efficacy beliefs may affect how physiological arousal during exams is construed as a valence of positive emotion. Survey data were collected from 172 students in a statistics course at a large research university in the Midwest. Students provided self-reported intensity of autonomic arousal during previous exams, statistics self-efficacy, and positive affect toward a proximal final exam. The construal bias hypothesis was supported by a significant interaction between autonomic arousal and self-efficacy on the dependent variable positive affect. Results revealed that as autonomic arousal increased, so did the moderating effect of self-efficacy. Specifically, as physiological arousal intensified, students with high or low self-efficacy reported divergent levels of positive emotion. Implications for theory, research, and practice are discussed.

The relationship among social phobia, objective and perceived physiological reactivity, and anxiety sensitivity in an adolescent population

Physiological theories may be important in the development and maintenance of social phobia in youth. A limited literature base indicates that youth with social phobia experience increases in objective physiological arousal during social-evaluative situations and are more aware of such increases compared to nonanxious youth. Recent research suggests that youth with social phobia also evidence heightened levels of anxiety sensitivity, which may lead to interpretation of physiological arousal as dangerous or distressing, and, as a result, in avoidance of situations which produce increased physiological arousal. The purpose of the current study was to examine interaction among objective physiological arousal, perceived physiological arousal, and anxiety sensitivity among adolescents diagnosed with social phobia. A sample of community adolescents participated in two anxiety-provoking tasks during which objective physiological arousal was monitored, and after which perceived physiological arousal and anxiety sensitivity were evaluated. Results from this study evidenced no differences between social phobic and nonanxious adolescents with regard to objective physiological arousal during either anxiety-provoking tasks. Adolescents with social phobia, however, were more aware of measured increases in physiological arousal, as well as more afraid of the potential social implications of that arousal compared to nonanxious adolescents. Implications for theory and treatment are discussed.

Caffeine effects on ERPs and performance in an auditory Go/NoGo task

Objective Previous research has shown that caffeine produces a general increase in arousal. The present study examined caffeine-induced arousal effects on performance and auditory ERPs. We sought components showing amplitude changes without topography changes, as would be expected of a pure arousal amplification of source activity. Methods The effects of a single oral dose of caffeine (250 mg) were examined in a randomised double-blind placebo-controlled repeated-measures cross-over study. Subjects abstained from caffeine for 4 h before the testing sessions, which were conducted, in the afternoon, one week apart. A simple auditory Go/NoGo task was used, with a random mix of 75 tones at 1000 Hz and 75 at 1500 Hz. All tones were 60 dB SPL, 50 ms duration (rise/fall time 5 ms), with SOA 1100 ms. Results There was a reduction in RT, but no effects on omission or commission errors. The major ERP effects of caffeine were focal rather than global increases in P1, P2 and P3b amplitudes to Go stimuli, with no changes in latency. There were no effects on N1 or N2 to Go stimuli, and no effects on any components in response to NoGo stimuli. Conclusions The results suggest that caffeine differentially improves aspects of the processing related to response production and task performance, contrary to the widespread amplification of ERP component amplitudes, and latency reductions, expected of an increase in general arousal. Significance These results add auditory ERP data to the list of complex effects of caffeine on brain function and behaviour. They appear to rule out a simple arousal interpretation, and suggest directions for future research.

Task modulation of the effects of brightness on reaction time and response force

Van der Molen and Keuss [van der Molen, M.W., Keuss, P.J.G., 1979. The relationship between reaction time and intensity in discrete auditory tasks. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 31, 95–102; van der Molen, M.W., Keuss, P.J.G., 1981. Response selection and the processing of auditory intensity. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 33, 177–184] showed that paradoxically long reaction times (RT) occur with extremely loud auditory stimuli when the task is difficult (e.g. needs a response choice). It was argued that this paradoxical behavior of RT is due to active suppression of response prompting to prevent false responses. In the present experiments, we demonstrated that such an effect can also occur for visual stimuli provided that they are large enough. Additionally, we showed that response force exerted by participants on response keys monotonically grew with intensity for large stimuli but was independent of intensity for small visual stimuli. Bearing in mind that only large stimuli are believed to be arousing this pattern of results supports the arousal interpretation of the negative effect of loud stimuli on RT given by van der Molen and Keuss.

The incidence of alexithymia in physiotherapy outpatients

Alexithymia is a concept within the psychosomatic paradigm used to describe people who have marked difficulties in the verbal expression of their feelings. The alexithymic individual demonstrates inadequacy both in the interpretation of emotional arousal and in finding appropriate vocabulary to describe feelings. Consequently, they express this arousal in physical terms. Alexithymia has been variously shown to be a constant personality ''trait'', perhaps linked to social and familial environments, and a ''state'' phenomenon occurring in response to specific conditions. The concept appears universal to all cultures. Insufficient data exist to determine clearly the prevalence of alexithymia; emerging evidence suggests a prevalence of between 10 and 20% in population samples. In certain clinical populations prevalence is significantly higher. No study has investigated the incidence of alexithymia in the physiotherapy client population. This study used the Toronto alexithymia scale (TAS-20) to assess the presence of alexithymia in a physiotherapy outpatient population (n = 245). The results showed that 27% of the sample were alexithymic and 22% borderline alexithymic. Statistical analysis across gender, age, diagnostic group, and chronicity of condition found no differences between groups at the 95% confidence limit. It is concluded that alexithymic characteristics, such as the augmentation of physical symptoms and somatisation of emotional conflict, are present at high levels in all referral groups. To engage in successful evidence-based rehabilitation, physiotherapists require an understanding of alexithymia and related somatothymias.

High and low intensity exercise and psychological mood states

This paper reports the results of two field experiments which examined the effects of running at different intensities on mood states. Two different groups of regularly exercising male subjects ran either 5.0 km or 1.7 km on running trails familiar to the subjects at both high and low intensity. Psychological mood states, including stress and arousal, were measured just before and immediately after running in a mixed blocks experimental design. Analysis of mood data allowed comparisons of high and low intensity running and fast and slow runners to be made. Running at high intensity over both distances increased arousal levels. Running the shorter distance at high intensity also produced increases in stress and serious-playful scores. Differences were found in mood response between fast and slow runners. Order effects were only checked for in the second experiment and some order effects concerned with the stress and serious-playful mood states were found. The findings are discussed in terms of theoretical models which emphasise the importance of individual interpretation of mood states, like stress and arousal, in mood experience.

Attack priming and satiation in female golden hamsters: Tests of some alternatives to the aggression arousal interpretation

“Priming” a female hamster by allowing it a single attack on an intruder placed into its home cage transiently decreases the latency and increases the probability of attack on a second trial. Although we have previously argued that this priming effect reflects an increase in aggressive arousal, an alternative interpretation is that the fear elicited by placing a foreign object into the subject's home cage is reduced when it happens again on the second trial. Another interpretation is that priming is an effect of intruder novelty, i.e., the subject perceives a difference between the first and second intruders which causes it to attack the second more quickly. Experiment 1 compared the standard two trial paradigm with different intruders to trials in which (1) the first intruder was withdrawn and used again in the second trial, and (2) the intruder remained in the cage following the first attack. All intruders were pretreated with the analgesic-sedative methotrimeprazine to reduce the variability of their behavior. Neither hypothesis tested in Experiment 1 was supported, strengthening the interpretation of attack priming as a manipulation that affects primarily internal motivational mechanisms specific to aggression. Allowing a hamster to carry out a protracted series of attacks produces a “satiation” effect that is the reverse of priming, i.e., the latency of a subsequent attack is increased and its probability reduced. It is possible that the attack satiation observed in our earlier studies was not the result of processes internal to the subject, but could have been due to habituation to a particular intruder or to certain stimuli emitted by it during the protracted interaction. In Experiment 2 subjects were given three sessions of 10 successive trials using either 1 intruder presented repeatedly, 2 intruders presented alternately, or 10 different intruders presented once each. No difference among conditions was found in this study either suggesting that subject's aggressive behavior is insensitive to whatever changes may occur in intruders' behavior or other stimulus characteristics when they have been treated with methotrimeprazine. The lack of differences among test conditions in both experiments is most likely due to the efficacy of the drug in “standardizing” intruder behavior. Experiment 2 also revealed an interesting difference in two measures of attack latency. The time elapsing between intruder presentation and attack, i.e., the standard measure of latency, decreased from the first to the fourth trail; it then increased steadily over the remaining trials. The cumulative time that the subject remained in contact with the intruder prior to attack, a measure more indicative of attention to the intruder, dropped to an asymptotic value by the second trial. This difference suggests that the satiation effect may be accounted for by subjects' increasing avoidance of the intruders over trails, perhaps as a way of regualting their level of aggressive arousal.

Sensation-seeking: electrodermal and behavioral effects of stimulus content and intensity

Although a number of studies support an arousal theory interpretation of differential sensation-seeking behavior, the conditions under which arousal correlates of this personality dimension are manifest is as yet unclear. Both theory and research suggest that among the external factors affecting the differential arousal response are stimulus relevance and stimulus intensity. The present study assessed the impact of these factors on both psychophysiological and behavioral responses. Subjects were preselected to represent the extremes of the sensation-seeking dimension, then exposed to auditory and visual presentations of a series of sexual and aggressive stimuli of systematically varied intensity. High sensation seekers gave larger amplitude SCRs to violent stimuli and larger initial responses to sexual stimuli presented visually, while verbal response intensities showed an opposite pattern. Overall, results provided support for an arousal theory interpretation of sensation-seeking, but suggested that the probability and magnitude of group differences is a somewhat complex function of stimulus intensity, stimulus modality, and perhaps other factors not yet assessed.

Taste reactivity analysis of 6-hydroxydopamine-induced aphagia: Implications for arousal and anhedonia hypotheses of dopamine function.

The deficits in feeding and drinking that result from 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA) lesions of the mesostriatal dopamine system are often explained using either sensorimotor arousal or anhedonia hypotheses. Sensorimotor arousal hypotheses posit that dopamine systems facilitate the capacity of sensory stimuli to activate any motor output. The anhedonia hypothesis suggests that dopamine systems amplify the hedonic impact of positive reinforcers. Natural palatability-dependent ingestive and aversive actions, which are emitted by rats to tastes, provide a sensitive test that can discriminate between these hypotheses: A reduction of sensorimotor arousal should diminish the ability of tastes to elicit any actions, whereas anhedonia should shift the balance between positive and aversive actions. To directly compare these two hypotheses, taste reactivity was examined in rats made aphagic by intranigral 6-OHDA injections. The results did not support either of these predictions: Taste reactivity was essentially unchanged. The persistence of normal taste reactivity argues against both an anhedonia and a global sensorimotor arousal interpretation and provides further evidence that the capacity for hedonics can be neurologically dissociated from motivated appetitive behavior. An incentive attribution hypothesis that can account for the results is discussed, along with its implications for a wide range of phenomena associated with dopamine depletion.

The social form of feeling

Within social psychology emotion has been studied either as a collection of discrete states or as the product of the cognitive interpretation of arousal. These traditions have accepted that feeling resides inside individuals and is controlled by social structures. This paper argues an alternative position; that emotion is expressive of the relationship of individuals to society. Insofar as individual feeling is subject to articulation it has form; to the extent that social systems are value‐laden they embody feeling. Using these arguments a conceptual framework is outlined within which emotion is treated as a universal feature of the coordination of individual and social life, within which its degree and form of expression can be understood. From this perspective, questions of the mode of articulation of feeling, the legitimacy of emotional expression and the place of mental and physical imagery in affective settings become central to an understanding, not only of particular emotions, but of social relations in general.

A selective attention deficit in the rat following induced dopamine receptor supersensitivity.

In the blocking paradigm, prior training to one conditioned stimulus (CSA) blocks the ability to attend to a second conditioned stimulus (CSB) when the two form a compound (CSAB) in subsequent training. Blocking is an associative process by which animals learn to ignore CSB because it contains no new information regarding the reinforcing event. In Experiment 1, dopamine (DA) receptor supersensitivity was induced in rats by prolonged pretreatment with haloperidol. The animals with DA receptor supersensitivity failed to show blocking by responding equivalently to both elements of the CSAB compound. This effect was replicated in Experiment 2, which also tested for an arousal interpretation of disrupted blocking by introducing a novel stimulus following training. Supersensitive rats were no more responsive to this novel stimulus than were control animals, which supports a selective attention deficit interpretation of disrupted blocking with DA receptor supersensitivity. This attentional deficit resembles behavioral perseverations induced by DA agonists.

Electrodermal orienting to stimulus omission

The study examined whether complete omission of a tone stimulus following its repeated presentation would elicit an electrodermal orienting response and whether the factors of stimulus significance and subject lability influenced the probability and magnitude of any response to omission. A statistically significant increase in response on omission trials over that in control periods without stimulation preceding omission was observed. The omission effect was more likely to occur with labile subjects, those showing high levels of nonspecific electrodermal activity, than with stabiles; stimulus significance was not found to exert any systematic effect. Contrary to expectation, a measure of EEG alpha activity included in the study failed to show the omission effect. The failure was attributed to problems of measurement. Incidental findings of the study refute an arousal interpretation of electrodermal lability.

Effects of Photographic Evidence on Mock Juror Judgement1

Effects of three levels of photographic evidence (color, black & white, no photograph) on 144 female subjects' monetary awards to an injured plaintiff were investigated in a 3 × 2 × 3 factorial design. Also manipulated were two levels of the severity of the plaintiff's injury and three levels of defendant blame. As predicted, a significant three‐way interaction was observed such that the magnitude of the difference in monetary damages awarded the more and less severely injured plaintiff was greatest in the presence of the color photograph depicting injuries and when defendant blame was high. An emotional arousal interpretation for the effects of photographic evidence is tentatively offered.