Effect of worrisome and relaxing thinking on fearful emotional processing

This study replicated and extended previous data suggesting that worry inhibits emotional processing of fearful imagery. Female participants categorized as either victimization-fearful (N = 24) or victimization and speech-fearful (N = 27) completed trials of worrisome or relaxing thinking and tone-cued imagery. For each trial, participants engaged in 30 s of relaxing or worrisome (speech or victimization) thinking and then imagined speech or victimization fear scenes for 15 s. Heart rate and facial electromyography activity at the corrugator supercilii region were measured during the think and imagery periods to estimate degree of emotional processing of the fear imagery. Consistent with earlier findings, there was greater heart rate suppression during fearful imagery after a period of worry as opposed to relaxation. This finding, however, may have been the result of physiological differences between worrisome and relaxation thinking. Corrugator activation during thinking showed a similar pattern as the heart rate data while corrugator activation during fearful imagery was dependent on the baseline employed. These data, in combination with the imagery ratings data, suggest that worry may be an unsuccessful strategy for avoiding the physiological activation associated with emotional processing.     

Enhancing the Benefits of Written Emotional Disclosure Through Response Training

Writing about a personal stressful event has been found to have psychological and physical health benefits, especially when physiological response increases during writing. Response training was developed to amplify appropriate physiological reactivity in imagery exposure. The present study examined whether response training enhances the benefits of written emotional disclosure. Participants were assigned to either a written emotional disclosure condition (n = 113) or a neutral writing condition (n = 133). Participants in each condition wrote for 20 minutes on 3 occasions and received response training (n = 79), stimulus training (n = 84) or no training (n = 83). Heart rate and skin conductance were recorded throughout a 10-minute baseline, 20-minute writing, and a 10-minute recovery period. Self-reported emotion was assessed in each session. One month after completing the sessions, participants completed follow-up assessments of psychological and physical health outcomes. Emotional disclosure elicited greater physiological reactivity and self-reported emotion than neutral writing. Response training amplified physiological reactivity to emotional disclosure. Greater heart rate during emotional disclosure was associated with the greatest reductions in event-related distress, depression, and physical illness symptoms at follow-up, especially among response trained participants. Results support an exposure explanation of emotional disclosure effects and are the first to demonstrate that response training facilitates emotional processing and may be a beneficial adjunct to written emotional disclosure.     

The role of ethnicity,gender, emotional content,and contextual differences in physiological,expressive, and self-reported emotional responses to imagery

Cardiovascular responses, skin conductance, corrugator ("frown"), and zygomaticus ("smile") electromyographic activity, and self-reported emotional responses were examined in response to scenarios that varied in emotional content and whether they involved interacting with a Black or White person. Black (33 women, 25 men) and White (28 women, 26 men) students imagined joy, neutral, fear, and anger situations. Emotional contents replicated patterns of physiological and self-reported emotion found in other studies, although gender differences in emotion found in other studies were evident only in White participants. Blacks exhibited more positive facial expressions, while Whites were more negatively expressive. Blacks, and particularly Black men, exhibited greater blood pressure reactivity to the emotional contexts. For both White and Black participants, imagined interactions with Blacks increased both positive and negative facial expression. Results suggest that, compared to Whites, Blacks are both more autonomically reactive to emotional interactions and may be responded to more emotionally. The results are discussed in terms of the need to study specific contextual factors rather than broad cross-cultural characterisations.     

Emotional dimensions as determinants of self-focused attention

Negative emotions, and particularly sadness, have been found to induce self-focused attention among both depressed and normal individuals. However, positive emotion, such as happiness, is sometimes found to have a similar effect. The present study examines the effect of emotion on self-focus induction by looking separately at the emotional dimensions of valence and arousal. It postulates that arousal would be even more potent than valence in increasing self-focus, since it increases the salience of the self. Results of Experiment 1 showed that emotions that are both intense and negative, such as fear, induce the most self-focus, but pleasant relaxation also resulted in increased self-focusing. Experiment 2, using a similar design, replicated the arousal effect, and showed that fear and joy, the two most arousing emotions resulted in the most self-focus.     

The Role of Self-Focus,Task Difficulty,Task Self-Relevance,and Evaluation Anxiety in Reaction Time Performance

Self-focused attention has been found to facilitate task performance in some instances and inhibit it in others. Among chronically anxious individuals it appears to consistently hinder performance. Less is known about the impact of self-focus on the performance of normal individuals. The present study examines the role of task difficulty, task self-relevance, and presence of evaluation anxiety in the performance effects of self-focus among normal individuals. Participants performed a simple reaction time (RT) and a lexical decision task, in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively, with or without self-focus. Self-focus and evaluation anxiety resulted in faster responding in simple RT, but there was no significant effect of self-focus on performance in the more difficult lexical decision task. Participants' heart rate (HR) was monitored and indicated that orienting was associated with slower RT in both experiments, and less orienting was found during self-focus and evaluation conditions. Results are interpreted in light of several self-focus theories.     

Fear imagery and the startle-probe reflex

Blink reflexes to acoustic probes, heart rate, and subjective reports were studied during affective memory imagery. Thirty-six undergraduates memorized 6 pairs of neutral and fearful sentences. After learning each pair, they relaxed and listened to a series of uniform tones, one every 6 s. A change in tone pitch (higher or lower) cued recall of one of the two sentences. At the first cue tone, groups (n = 12) were under different instructions: (a) ignore the sentence and relax, (b) silently articulate the sentence, and (c) imagine the sentence content as a personal experience. At the second cue tone, all subjects performed the imagery task. Startle probes (50-ms, 95-dB white noise) were presented unpredictably during relaxation and recall trials. Probe blink reflexes were larger and cardiac rate faster at fear sentence recall than at neutral sentence recall or relaxation. For probe reflexes, this effect was greater for imagery than for nonsemantic recall tasks.     

Perceptual and perceptual-motor fluency as a basis for affective judgements: Individual differences in motor memory activation

Abstract

The current study investigated the repetition-liking effect as a function of variations in perceptual-motor processing and individual differences in use of perceptual-motor information. Turkish words from earlier repetition-liking research were used in comparing: (1) perceptual (looking) versus perceptual-motor (looking and pronouncing) processing; and (2) perceptual-motor fluency versus disfluency (pronouncing words in a consistent versus an inconsistent manner). Subjects were divided into groups based on an assessment of imagery ability, a variable associated with the tendency to reactivate motor information in memory. Words were liked more after fluent than after disfluent processing, but only in people with good imagery ability. Perceptual-motor fluency had no effect on the repetition-liking effect in poor imagers. It was concluded that perceptual-motor fluency has an important impact on liking judgements, and that this effect is mediated by individual differences in the tendency to automatically activate motor information stored during previous processing of a stimulus.     

Processing fearful and neutral sentences: Memory and heart rate change

Abstract

Thirty college student subjects were instructed to process fearful or neutral sentences on cue. Cue tones were presented randomly within a repetitive series of non-signal tones (1 every 6sec). A change in tone frequency (higher or lower) was the signal to recall either the fearful or the neutral member of a previously memorised sentence pair. At the first signal for retrieval, and depending on group assignment, subjects engaged in one of three text processing tasks: null task (i.e. subjects were told not to process the sentence at this first cue), silent articulation of the sentence, or imagery of the text content. A second retrieval signal followed the first, at which time all subjects did the imagery task. Fearful sentences resulted in greater heart rate acceleration than neutral sentences. This affective discrimination was greatest for imagery (during both processing periods), but it was also apparent during articulation, and even to some extent during null sentence processing. This result was interpreted as evidence of spread of activation from language propositions to response propositions, consistent with the associative network structure of fear described in bio-information processing theory.