Abstract
The present study sought to investigate peripheral physiological responses to the anticipation of explicitly and ambiguously cued emotional pictures. Emotionally positive and negative as well as neutral pictures were presented to 32 healthy subjects. At the beginning of an anticipation period they were cued about the valence of the upcoming picture (neutral, positive, negative, or ambiguous). Skin conductance, heart rate, and zygomaticus and corrugator electromyogram responses were measured during anticipation and perception. Responses specific to the emotional conditions were observed during anticipation as well as during perception. During the anticipation of ambiguously cued pictures, responses were similar to responses elicited by anticipating negative pictures. In line with results from brain imaging studies, peripheral physiological responses could be interpreted to reflect a negative bias for ambiguous events.
References
(2012). Knowing how much you don’t know: A neural organization of uncertainty estimates. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 13, 572–586.
(2006). Attentional modulation of emotional stimulus processing: An fMRI study using emotional expectancy. Human Brain Mapping, 27, 662–677.
(2001). Emotion and motivation I: Defensive and appetitive reactions in picture processing. Emotion, 1, 276–298.
(2001). Emotion and motivation II: Sex differences in picture processing. Emotion, 1, 300–319.
(1990). Startle reflex modification: Emotion or attention? Psychophysiology, 27, 513–522.
(2001). Functional imaging of neural responses to expectancy and experience of monetary gains and losses. Neuron, 30, 619–639.
(2010). Serotonergic and noradrenergic modulation of emotion processing by single dose antidepressants. Neuropsychopharmacology, 35, 521–533.
(1986). Electromyographic activity over facial muscle regions can differentiate the valence and intensity of affective reactions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 260–268.
(1872). The expression of the emotions in man and animals. London, UK: John Murray.
(2002). Startle modulation before, during and after exposure to emotional stimuli. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 43, 191–196.
(1982). Facial reactions to facial expressions. Psychophysiology, 19, 643–647.
(1986). Facial reactions to fear-relevant and fear-irrelevant stimuli. Biological Psychology, 23, 153–161.
(1982). The heart beats to reward: The effect of monetary incentive on heart rate. Psychophysiology, 19, 506–513.
(1991). Evolution and facial action in reflex, social motive, and paralanguage. Biological Psychology, 32, 3–100.
(2007). Prospection: Experiencing the future. Science, 317, 1351–1354.
(2009). Valence lasts longer than arousal persistence of induced moods as assessed by psychophysiological measures. Journal of Psychophysiology, 23, 7–17.
(1989). Affective judgment and psychophysiological response: Dimensional covariation in the evaluation of pictorial stimuli. Journal of Psychophysiology, 3, 51–64.
(2011). Uncertainty is associated with biased expectancies and heightened responses to aversion. Emotion, 11, 413–424.
(2013). Uncertainty and anticipation in anxiety: An integrated neurobiological and psychological perspective. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 14, 488–501.
(1970). Autonomic responses to affective visual stimulation. Psychophysiology, 7, 408–417.
(2007). Neural correlates of a “pessimistic” attitude when anticipating events of unknown emotional valence. NeuroImage, 34, 848–858.
(2010). Negative bias of processing ambiguously cued emotional stimuli. Neuroreport, 21, 601–605.
(2001). Anticipation of increasing monetary reward selectively recruits nucleus accumbens. Journal of Neuroscience, 21, RC159.
(2005). The subjective experience of pain: Where expectations become reality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102, 12950–12955.
(2005). International affective picture system (IAPS): Digitized photographs, instruction manual and affective ratings. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida.
(1993). Looking at pictures: Affective, facial, visceral, and behavioral reactions. Psychophysiology, 30, 261–273.
(1973). Pupillary and cardiac activity during visual attention. Psychophysiology, 10, 270–294.
(2013). A general and simple method for obtaining R2 from generalized linear mixed-effects models. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 4, 133–142.
(2012). Voluntary emotion suppression modifies psychophysiological responses to films. Journal of Psychophysiology, 26, 116–123.
(2001). Affective startle modulation in anticipation and perception. Psychophysiology, 38, 719–722.
(2011). Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music. Nature Neuroscience, 14, 257–262.
(2010). Uncertainty during anticipation modulates neural responses to aversion in human insula and amygdala. Cerebral Cortex, 20, 929–940.
(2007). Linear mixed models: A practical guide using statistical software. Boca Raton, FL: Chapman Hall/CRC.
(2005). ANSLAB: Autonomic Nervous System Laboratory (version 4.0). Available at www.sprweb.org/repository/index.cfm
