Fear and disgust in women: Differentiation of cardiovascular regulation patterns

Approaches to studying emotion using physiological responses to spoken narratives: A scoping review

Narratives are effective tools for evoking emotions, and physiological measurements provide a means of objectively assessing emotional reactions - making them a potentially powerful pair of tools for studying emotional processes. However, extent research combining emotional narratives and physiological measurement varies widely in design and application, making it challenging to identify previous work, consolidate findings, and design effective experiments. Our scoping review explores the use of auditory emotional narratives and physiological measures in research, examining paradigms, study populations, and represented emotions. Following the PRISMA-ScR Checklist, we searched five databases for peer-reviewed experimental studies that used spoken narratives to induce emotion and reported autonomic physiological measures. Among 3466 titles screened and 653 articles reviewed, 110 studies were included. Our exploration revealed a variety of applications and experimental paradigms; emotional narratives paired with physiological measures have been used to study diverse topics and populations, including neurotypical and clinical groups. Although incomparable designs and sometimes contradictory results precluded general recommendations as regards which physiological measures to use when designing new studies, as a whole, the body of work suggests that these tools can be valuable to study emotions. Our review offers an overview of research employing narratives and physiological measures for emotion study, and highlights weaknesses in reporting practices and gaps in our knowledge concerning the robustness and specificity of physiological measures as indices of emotion. We discuss study design considerations and transparent reporting, to facilitate future using emotional narratives and physiological measures in studying emotions.

Conceptual-level disgust conditioning in contamination-based obsessive-compulsive disorder

Pavlovian fear conditioning and extinction represent learning mechanisms underlying exposure-based interventions. While increasing evidence indicates a pivotal role of disgust in the development of contamination-based obsessive-compulsive disorder (C-OCD), dysregulations in conditioned disgust acquisition and maintenance, in particular driven by higher-order conceptual processes, have not been examined. Here, we address this gap by exposing individuals with high (HCC, n = 41) or low (LCC, n = 41) contamination concern to a conceptual-level disgust conditioning and extinction paradigm. Conditioned stimuli (CS+) were images from one conceptual category partially reinforced by unconditioned disgust-eliciting stimuli (US), while images from another category served as non-reinforced conditioned stimuli (CS-). Skin conductance responses (SCRs), US expectancy and CS valence ratings served as primary outcomes to quantify conditioned disgust responses. Relative to LCC, HCC individuals exhibited increased US expectancy and CS+ disgust experience, but comparable SCR levels following disgust acquisition. Despite a decrease in conditioned responses from the acquisition phase to the extinction phase, both groups did not fully extinguish the learned disgust. Importantly, the extinction resilience of acquired disgust was more pronounced in HCC individuals. Together, our findings suggest that individuals with high self-reported contamination concern exhibit increased disgust acquisition and resistance to extinction. The findings provide preliminary evidence on how dysregulated disgust learning mechanism across semantically related concepts may contribute to C-OCD.

Emotional and autonomic response to visual erotic stimulation in patients with functional hypothalamic amenorrhea

Introduction

Functional hypothalamic amenorrhea (FHA) is a clinical condition associated with high levels of physiological and psychological stress ranging from weight loss to maladaptive behavior and coping skills. A reliable measure of the psychophysiological response to stress and the ability to cope with stimuli is heart rate variability (HRV). Through the sympathetic (SNS) and parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), the autonomic nervous system (ANS) promotes various changes in HRV that reflect the individual's psychophysiological response to stress. FHA patients are characterized by high levels of PNS activation during psychological load, suggesting that parasympathetic hyperactivation could be a pathology marker.

Methods

In the present study, we examine changes in HRV during observation of erotic, neutral, and disgusting images in 10 patients with FHA [(mean ± S.D.) age: 26.8 ± 5.9] and in 9 controls (age: 25.4 ± 6.4; BMI: 22.47 ± 2.97) to assess the differential activation of PNS and SNS between FHA patients and controls matched for age and without other clinical conditions.

Results

Our results showed that FHA patients had significantly higher HRV activation while observing high emotional value images and not during the observation of neutral images confirming a parasympathetic hyperactivation.

Discussion

HRV and cognitive and psychological testing, could provide new insights into understanding such a clinically understudied condition and provide further tools for clinical diagnosis and treatment.

Generalization gradients for fear and disgust in human associative learning

Previous research indicates that excessive fear is a critical feature in anxiety disorders; however, recent studies suggest that disgust may also contribute to the etiology and maintenance of some anxiety disorders. It remains unclear if differences exist between these two threat-related emotions in conditioning and generalization. Evaluating different patterns of fear and disgust learning would facilitate a deeper understanding of how anxiety disorders develop. In this study, 32 college students completed threat conditioning tasks, including conditioned stimuli paired with frightening or disgusting images. Fear and disgust were divided into two randomly ordered blocks to examine differences by recording subjective US expectancy ratings and eye movements in the conditioning and generalization process. During conditioning, differing US expectancy ratings (fear vs. disgust) were found only on CS-, which may demonstrated that fear is associated with inferior discrimination learning. During the generalization test, participants exhibited greater US expectancy ratings to fear-related GS1 (generalized stimulus) and GS2 relative to disgust GS1 and GS2. Fear led to longer reaction times than disgust in both phases, and the pupil size and fixation duration for fear stimuli were larger than for disgust stimuli, suggesting that disgust generalization has a steeper gradient than fear generalization. These findings provide preliminary evidence for differences between fear- and disgust-related stimuli in conditioning and generalization, and suggest insights into treatment for anxiety and other fear- or disgust-related disorders.

Affective communication during bad news consultation. Effect on analogue patients' heart rate variability and recall

OBJECTIVE

The aim of the study was to investigate the effect of physicians' supportive communication on analogue patients' (APs) heart rate variability (HRV) and recall, while watching a video of palliative treatment being explained to a female patient.

METHODS

Sixty healthy women, acting as APs, were randomly assigned to watch one of two versions (standard vs. affective) of a scripted video-vignette of a bad news consultation to a female patient. The physician's communication differed only in the delivery of four supportive comments. Empathy, support and engagement perception were assessed by three questions. APs' HR was recorded during video-observation and recall was assessed immediately after. HRV was determined through measures defined in time and frequency domains.

RESULTS

Data of 54 APs (27 + 27) were included. The group with supportive communication perceived the physician as more empathic and supportive. Intra- and Inter-group comparisons suggested a greater sense of stress in the standard communication group. Recall did not differ in the two groups.

CONCLUSION AND PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS

Findings show that the use of supportive expressions contribute to the perception of the physician as more empathic, potentially buffer patients' arousal after a bad news announcement, but does not confirm a positive impact on general recall.

Risky economic choices and frontal EEG asymmetry in the context of Reinforcer-Sensitivity-Theory-5

This study investigated individual risky choice behavior in a gambling task and its relation with traits proposed by the Reinforcer-Sensitivity-Theory-5 (RST-5; Corr & McNaughton in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 36(10), 2339-2354, 2012) as well as with frontal EEG asymmetry. As assumed by the RST-5, the results showed independent influences of approach/avoidance and gain/loss sensitivities on participants' behavior in risky choices. Individual approach/avoidance sensitivity was predicted by trait measures of the behavioral approach system (BAS) and the behavioral inhibition system (BIS), while no such correlation was present for gain/loss sensitivity. EEG recordings revealed relatively stronger left-frontal cortical activity for trials with approach motivation compared to conflict and avoidance motivation. On the individual level, relatively stronger left-frontal cortical activity was associated with trait BAS. In addition, activity changes in frontal EEG asymmetry were associated relatively higher behavioral approach sensitivity. We conclude that frontal EEG asymmetry is an especially useful neuronal marker of BAS sensitivity and that the traits proposed by the RST-5 (measured by frontal EEG asymmetry and self-report) can be used to explain individual differences in risky choice behavior.