Self-reported Emotional Arousal Research Articles

Transcranial Focused Ultrasound Targeting the Amygdala May Increase Psychophysiological and Subjective Negative Emotional Reactivity in Healthy Older Adults

BackgroundThe amygdala is highly implicated in an array of psychiatric disorders but is not accessible using currently available noninvasive neuromodulatory techniques. Low-intensity transcranial focused ultrasound (TFUS) is a neuromodulatory technique that has the capability of reaching subcortical regions noninvasively. MethodsWe studied healthy older adult participants (N = 21, ages 48–79 years) who received TFUS targeting the right amygdala and left entorhinal cortex (active control region) using a 2-visit within-participant crossover design. Before and after TFUS, behavioral measures were collected via the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and an emotional reactivity and regulation task utilizing neutral and negatively valenced images from the International Affective Picture System. Heart rate and self-reported emotional valence and arousal were measured during the emotional reactivity and regulation task to investigate subjective and physiological responses to the task. ResultsSignificant increases in both self-reported arousal in response to negative images and heart rate during emotional reactivity and regulation task intertrial intervals were observed when TFUS targeted the amygdala; these changes were not evident when the entorhinal cortex was targeted. No significant changes were found for state anxiety, self-reported valence to the negative images, cardiac response to the negative images, or emotion regulation. ConclusionsThe results of this study provide preliminary evidence that a single session of TFUS targeting the amygdala may alter psychophysiological and subjective emotional responses, indicating some potential for future neuropsychiatric applications. However, more work on TFUS parameters and targeting optimization is necessary to determine how to elicit changes in a more clinically advantageous way.

The emotion trajectory of self-selected jazz music with lyrics: A psychophysiological perspective

This study explored how lyrics, participant-selected music, and emotion trajectory impact self-reported emotional (happiness, sadness, arousal, and valence) and physiological (heart, respiration, and skin conductance rates) responses. Participants were matched (based on sex, age, musicianship, and lyric preference) and assigned to a lyric or instrumental group. Each participant experienced one emotion trajectory (happy-sad or sad-happy), with alternating self- and experimenter-selected jazz music. Emotion trajectory had a significant effect on self-reports, where participants in the sad-happy trajectory reported significantly more sadness overall compared to participants in the happy-sad trajectory. There were also several interaction effects between the independent variables, which indicate the relevance of order as well as differences in processing musical emotions depending on whether music is instrumental or contains lyrics.

Can we predict experiential avoidance by measuring subjective and physiological emotional arousal?

Experiential avoidance is an index of psychological inflexibility linked to psychological difficulties. This article presents data from two experiments that seek to investigate whether the discordance between subjective and physiological responses to emotion-eliciting conditions may indicate different levels of experiential avoidance. Both experiments utilized mental imagery to elicit fear, sadness, joy, relaxation and neutral emotions in young adults, while self-reported emotional arousal and physiological reactivity (heart rate and skin conductance) were measured. Results showed that greater experiential avoidance was predicted by higher physiological reactivity and was associated with lower subjective arousal in negatively-valenced conditions, i.e. fearful and sad, especially when participants had to focus their attention on environmental, vs somatic, stimuli. The discordance in emotional responses, which was linked to experiential avoidance in this study, may be used as an objective measure of experiential avoidance with research and clinical utility.

Hemodynamic and electrocortical reactivity to specific scene contents in emotional perception.

Emotional scene perception is characterized by enhanced neural activity across broad regions of visual cortex, the frontoparietal network, and anterior corticolimbic structures. In human fMRI and electrocortical experiments, activation enhancement is strongly related to self-reported emotional arousal evoked by scene stimuli. However, an additional bias in reaction to pleasant scenes has been reported in a subset of emotion-enhanced brain regions. Human fMRI and primate electrophysiological studies show biased frontoparietal network activity in response to rewarding cues. In addition, activation in lateral occipital regions may show a bias in pleasant scene perception, as shown in fMRI and in the early posterior negativity (EPN) ERP component. To define this potential pleasure bias, we presented a balanced set of naturalistic scenes to participants during separate fMRI and ERP recording sessions. Consistent with past work, the amplitude of the slow-wave late positive potential (LPP), as well as hemodynamic activity in fusiform gyrus and amygdala, showed equivalent enhancement across highly arousing pleasant and unpleasant, relative to neutral scenes. In addition to this emotional enhancement, the EPN component, as well as hemodynamic activity in lateral occipital cortex and frontoparietal network, showed greater reactivity during highly arousing pleasant relative to unpleasant scenes, consistent with a pleasure bias. The interpretation of this pattern of reactivity is discussed with respect to selective and evolved attention mechanisms.

Fear and Reward Circuit Alterations in Pediatric CRPS.

In chronic pain, a number of brain regions involved in emotion (e.g., amygdala, hippocampus, nucleus accumbens, insula, anterior cingulate, and prefrontal cortex) show significant functional and morphometric changes. One phenotypic manifestation of these changes is pain-related fear (PRF). PRF is associated with profoundly altered behavioral adaptations to chronic pain. For example, patients with a neuropathic pain condition known as complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) often avoid use of and may even neglect the affected body area(s), thus maintaining and likely enhancing PRF. These changes form part of an overall maladaptation to chronic pain. To examine fear-related brain circuit alterations in humans, 20 pediatric patients with CRPS and 20 sex- and age-matched healthy controls underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in response to a well-established fearful faces paradigm. Despite no significant differences on self-reported emotional valence and arousal between the two groups, CRPS patients displayed a diminished response to fearful faces in regions associated with emotional processing compared to healthy controls. Additionally, increased PRF levels were associated with decreased activity in a number of brain regions including the right amygdala, insula, putamen, and caudate. Blunted activation in patients suggests that (a) individuals with chronic pain may have deficits in cognitive-affective brain circuits that may represent an underlying vulnerability or consequence to the chronic pain state; and (b) fear of pain may contribute and/or maintain these brain alterations. Our results shed new light on altered affective circuits in patients with chronic pain and identify PRF as a potentially important treatment target.

A Psychophysiological Study of Processing HIV/AIDS Public Service Announcements: The Effects of Novelty Appeals, Sexual Appeals, Narrative Versus Statistical Evidence, and Viewer’s Sex

ABSTRACTThis study used self-reports and physiological measures—heart rate (HR) and skin conductance level (SCL)—to examine the effects of novelty appeals, sexual appeals, narrative versus statistical evidence, and viewer’s sex on cognitive and emotional processing of HIV/AIDS public service announcements (PSAs) among heterosexually active single college students. Novelty or sexual appeals differently affected self-reported attention and cognitive effort as measured by HR. High- rather than low-novelty HIV/AIDS PSAs, perceived as more attention-eliciting, did not lead to more cognitive effort. High- rather than low-sex HIV/AIDS PSAs, not perceived as more attention-eliciting, led to more cognitive effort as reflected by greater HR deceleration. Novelty or sexual appeals also affected self-reported emotional arousal and SCL differently. HIV/AIDS PSAs with high rather than low levels of novelty or sexual appeals led to greater self-reported arousal, but not greater SCL. Message evidence interacted with message appeals to affect cognitive effort. Participants exerted greater cognitive effort during high- rather than low-novelty narrative HIV/AIDS PSAs, and during low- rather than high-novelty statistical ones. The advantage of high over low sexual appeals was more obvious in statistical than in narrative HIV/AIDS PSAs. Males reported greater emotional arousal than females during high- rather than low-sex HIV/AIDS PSAs.

Effects of virtual environment platforms on emotional responses

The goal of the current study was to investigate the effects of different virtual environment (VE) technologies (i.e., desktop, head mounted display, or fully immersive platforms) on emotional arousal and task performance. Fifty-three participants were recruited from a college population. Reactivity to stressful VEs was examined in three VE systems from desktop to high-end fully immersive systems. The experiment was a 3 (desktop system, head mounted display, and six wall system)×2 (high- and low-stressful VE) within subject design, with self-reported emotional arousal and valence, skin conductance, task performance, presence, and simulator sickness examined as dependent variables. Replicating previous studies, the fully immersive system induced the highest sense of presence and the head mounted display system elicited the highest amount of simulator sickness. Extending previous studies, the results demonstrated that VE platforms were associated with different patterns in emotional responses and task performance. Our findings suggest that different VE systems may be appropriate for different scientific purposes when studying stress reactivity using emotionally evocative tasks.

Actually in the Cinema: A Field Study Comparing Real 3D and 2D Movie Patrons' Attention, Emotion, and Film Satisfaction

While 3D movies and fantasy film genre rise in popularity, the empirical exploration of viewers' cognitive and emotional engagement with film is currently limited and entirely derived from laboratory-based studies of small samples. This study investigated the effect of stereoscopic realism (3D effect) on viewers' attention, emotion, and satisfaction by collecting data from 225 cinema patrons who were leaving the movie theatre having just viewed Thor. The viewers from the 3D condition rated their experience as more perceptually realistic and reported being less distracted during the film than their 2D counterparts. Yet no significant group differences were observed in self-reported emotional arousal or satisfaction with the whole experience. Further analysis revealed that perceptual realism was a better predictor of viewer satisfaction than emotional arousal. We consider the idea that these findings may be a function of the fantasy genre and call for researchers to extend this line of study.

Looking at the other side of the coin: A meta-analysis of self-reported emotional arousal in people with schizophrenia

Abnormalities in emotional experience have long been viewed as core features of schizophrenia. Numerous studies indicate that people with schizophrenia report less pleasure than controls when reporting non-current feelings using trait, hypothetical, prospective, and retrospective emotional self-report formats; however, current research has demonstrated that schizophrenia patients and controls do not differ in their subjective reactions to emotional stimuli in most laboratory studies. Although substantial attention has been paid to studies examining self-reported valence in schizophrenia, subjective reports of arousal in response to affective stimuli have been neglected. Understanding the role of arousal in schizophrenia is imperative given that valence and arousal are differentially associated with physiological and behavioral responses. To understand the role of self-reported arousal, a meta-analysis of 26 published studies employing laboratory emotion induction paradigms in patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls was conducted. Medline, PsycINFO, Web of Science, and PubMed electronic databases and reference lists from identified articles were used as data sources. Using a random effects model, analyses demonstrated that controls and people with schizophrenia reported similar levels of subjective arousal in response to pleasant and unpleasant stimuli; however, people with schizophrenia reported experiencing greater arousal than controls in response to neutral stimuli. Furthermore, moderator analyses suggested that gender and methodological factors, such as rating scale and stimulus type, may affect these patterns of results and play a key role in determining whether patients and controls differ in self-reported arousal.

How we relate to brands: Psychological and neurophysiological insights into consumer–brand relationships

In three experiments, this research provides new insights into branding by studying the psychological and neurophysiological mechanisms of how consumers relate to their beloved brands. The authors propose that emotional arousal decreases over the brand relationship span, while inclusion of the brand into the self increases over time. Results of experiment 1 indicate greater self-reported emotional arousal for recently formed brand relationships, as well as decreased emotional arousal and increased inclusion of close brands over time. Additionally, the moderating role of usage frequency of the brand brings out an interesting nuance of the way these effects operate. Experiment 2 measures skin conductance responses and reveals increased emotional arousal for recently formed close relationships but not for established close brand relationships, corroborating the results based on self-reported data. In experiment 3, a functional magnetic resonance imaging study reveals an association between established close relationships and activation of the insula, a brain area previously found to be a crucial mechanism in diverse but related psychological phenomena such as urging, addiction, loss aversion, and interpersonal love.

Relationship between adult attachment patterns, emotional experience and EEG frontal asymmetry

This study investigated whether adult attachment styles influence subjective and neurophysiological aspects of emotion. Self-reported emotional arousal and pleasantness and EEG frontal asymmetry were analysed while subjects watched emotional video-clips inducing happiness, fear and sadness with attachment-related content. Results showed a clear difference between attachment patterns on emotional arousal, resting frontal asymmetry and fluctuating asymmetry changes. Avoidant individuals responded to positive stimuli with less arousing subjective experience and right frontal asymmetry. In turn, preoccupied individuals showed higher arousal feelings and wider frontal left activation. Opposite patterns were observed in response to fear. These findings support the involvement of attachment in modelling individual emotional response and underlying brain functional processes, accounting partly for individual variability in human emotion.

Adolescent anorexia nervosa patients have a discrepancy between neurophysiological responses and self-reported emotional arousal to psychosocial stress

In both clinical practice and research, eating disorder patients are reported to have difficulties in identifying and describing their feelings. They are often described as being unaware of the linkage between their feelings and their behavior. The present study experimentally induced emotions in adolescent anorexia nervosa (AN) patients to examine both self-reported emotional arousal and neurophysiological responses. A group of 10 AN patients and a group of 22 healthy controls (HC) were compared with respect to changes in self-reported emotional arousal and neurophysiological responses, heart rate (HR) and HPA-axis response (cortisol in saliva) during a public speaking test inducing anxious stress. The AN group reported higher levels of anxiety, as a result of stress, but this was not reflected in their HR or cortisol response. By contrast, in the HC group higher levels of self-reported anxiety coincided with clear increases in HR and cortisol. The data indicate that AN patients, in contrast to healthy individuals, show a discordance between self-reported emotional and neurophysiological arousal during psychosocial stress.

Context-dependent cortical activation in response to financial reward and penalty: an event-related fMRI study

An event-related fMRI technique was used to assess neural responses to financial reward and penalty during a simple gambling task. We attempted to determine whether brain activities are dependent on the unique context of an event sequence. Thirty-six healthy volunteers participated in the study. The task was to guess the color of the suit of a card on each trial and to respond by pressing a button. Every correct response (“win”) and incorrect response (“loss”) was associated with financial reward and penalty, respectively. The magnitude of reward or penalty in each trial did not change; however, the subjects' self-reported emotional arousal was significantly higher for the events of “the fourth win of four wins in a row” and “the fourth loss of four losses in a row.” We also found that the bilateral anterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortices were specifically activated when the subjects experienced “the fourth win of four wins in a row” and “the fourth loss of four losses in a row. ”When the subjects experienced “a win following four losses in a row” or “a loss following four wins in a row, ”the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was specifically activated. Our data indicate that there exist brain activities associated with the event-sequence context in which abstract reward or penalty is received. These context-dependent activities appear to be crucial for adapting oneself to new circumstances and may account for clinical symptoms of various mental illnesses in which dysfunction of these regions has been reported.

Efficacy of four antihypertensive drugs (clonidine, enalapril, nitrendipine, oxprenolol) on stress blood pressure

The impact of 4 antihypertensive drug regimens on blood pressure (BP) during everyday life stress and on BP during experimental stress in the laboratory was examined in an open clinical study. Sixty middle-aged men with mild-to-moderate essential hypertension never previously treated were treated either with low-dose clonidine (n = 10), oxprenolol (n = 20), nitrendipine (n = 20) or enalapril (n = 10). Before therapy, all 4 groups did not differ in age, weight, degree of obesity, BP at work site and casual BP measured in the outpatient clinic. After 6 months of effective therapy (casual BP within the normotensive range), casual diastolic BP was identical among the 4 groups, whereas systolic BP was lower in patients treated with clonidine or oxprenolol than in those who received enalapril. A disparate pattern of antihypertensive efficacy among the 4 groups emerged when stress BP was compared, with average ambulatory BP higher in patients receiving clonidine or enalapril than in those who had oxprenolol or nitrendipine. During ambulatory BP monitoring, patients treated with oxprenolol had the lowest level at each level of physical activity and self-reported emotional arousal. During bicycle exercise, patients receiving clonidine had the highest increase in systolic BP and those administered oxprenolol the lowest, whereas the BP response during mental stress was similar among all 4 therapeutic groups. The analysis of the hemodynamic response pattern during mental stress unmasked further disparities. Oxprenolol provoked an abnormal hemodynamic response during mental stress tests (increase in total peripheral resistance), whereas nitrendipine and enalapril preserved the physiological hemodynamic profile (decrease of total peripheral resistance). These data indicate that ambulatory BP recording combined with assessment of activities and moods at any measurement and evaluation of the hemodynamic pattern during experimental stress yield a different profile for the efficacy of antihypertensive agents. In particular, systolic BP during everyday stress and experimental stress is differently affected by the various antihypertensive drugs.

Analysis of mood change during and following sleep deprivation therapy.

Recent work suggests that depriving endogenous depressives of sleep for 1 night may be followed by an alleviation of their illness. In order to facilitate further study of the mechanisms underlying this effect, hourly self-rated measurements of mood were obtained throughout the sleepless night and the time of onset of any response noted. Of the patients who improved, some did so during the day following sleep deprivation; in others the response did not occur until after the next night's sleep. The two groups of responders differed in terms of self-reported emotional arousal during the course of the sleepless night. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to further studies of sleep deprivation therapy.

The repression-sensitization variable and self-reported emotional arousal: Effects of stress and instructional set.

The repression-sensitization variable and self-reported emotional arousal: Effects of stress and instructional set.

The repression-sensitization variable and self-reported emotional arousal: effects of stress and instructional set.

The repression-sensitization variable and self-reported emotional arousal: effects of stress and instructional set.