P Philippot — Page 2 | PubMed Health

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Subjective and autonomic responses to emotion induction in psychopaths.

It has been theorized that psychopaths have a fundamental deficit with respect to emotions (Cleckley, 1941). This study compares psychopaths with control subjects (Hare, 1991) in terms of their physiological and subjective responses to video clips depicting different emotions: joy, fear, anger, sadness, and disgust. Physiological measures assessed cardiovascular, respiratory, electrodermal, electromyographic responding, as well as skin temperature. Subjective measures assessed bodily sensations and subjective emotional appraisal. The principal physiological difference was a lower blood pressure among psychopaths before and during emotional stimulation. Thus, while psychopaths's autonomic base-line may be generally hyporeactive, they do not seem to have any emotion-specific physiological deficit. Globally, the results suggested no specific psychophysiological deficits among psychopaths in a context using daily emotions. Subjective measures also revealed that, compared to control subjects, psychopaths reported less intense bodily sensations during emotional stimulation. There was no difference between the two groups in terms of emotional appraisal.

Adult↗

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Effects of anxiety on emotional reactivity, performance and vigilance, in healthy volunteers.

Healthy volunteers who participate in clinical trials usually present a specific personality profile characterized by high extroversion and low anxiety traits. Herein, we examined whether anxiety traits influence performance and vigilance, as well as reactivity for six emotions (fear, anger, disgust, sadness, happiness and a neutral state), the latter being induced by the presentation of six film excerpts. Sixty-four healthy volunteers were stratified into high and low anxiety groups on the basis of their score on the Cattell and Hamilton Anxiety Scales. They were assessed on the Digit Symbol Substitution Scale (DSST), Choice Reaction Time (CRT) and Visual Analogue Scales (VAS). Their emotional reactivity was evaluated before and after each film excerpt, on responses to the Differential Emotions Scale (Izard DES). Prior to emotional induction, high-anxious subjects presented a pattern of low positive emotions and high negative emotions. After each film excerpt, emotional reactivity was more pronounced for high-anxious subjects compared with low-anxious subjects. However, there were no significant interactions between anxiety level and the values of DSST, CRT or VAS. The present findings raise the question of the relevance of selecting healthy volunteers according to their personality traits. In future studies, anxiety level will be further investigated as a factor of response variability to drugs, by examining differences in response to psychotropic drugs as a function of this factor.

Anxiety↗