Modulation of the Time Course of Cardiac Chronotropic Responses during Exposure to Affective Pictures

One of the most important topics in attentional and emotional modulation of cardiac responses is time course of cardiac chronotropic response. The reason lies in dual innervation of heart, which leads to occurrence of several phases of cardiac response during exposure to affective stimuli, determined by the balance of sympathetic and parasympathetic influences. Cardiac chronotropic reactivity thus represents quite effective measure capable to trace the moment when attending and orienting processes (i.e., sensory intake of stimulus) prime relevant behavioral response (ile., emotion with approach or avoidance tendencies). The aim of this study was to find the time course of heart rate (HR) responses typical for negative (disgust, surprise, fear, anger) and positive (happiness, pleasant erotic) affective pictures and to identify cardiac response dissociation for emotions with different action tendencies such as "approach" (surprise, anger, happiness) and "avoidance" (fear, sadness, disgust). Forty college students participated in this study where cardiac responses to slides from IAPS intended to evoke basic emotions (surprise, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, happiness, pleasant-erotic). Inter-beat intervals of HR were analyzed on every 10 sec basis during 60 sec long exposure to affective visual stimuli. Obtained results demonstrated that differentiation was observed at the very first 10s of exposure (anger-fear, surprise-sad, surprise-erotic, surprise-happiness paris), reaching the peak of dissociation at 30s (same pairs plus surprise-disgust and surprise-fear) and was still effective for some pairs (surprise-erotic, surprise-sad) even at 50s and 60s. discussed are potential cardiac autonomic mechanisms underlying attention and emotion processes evoked by affective stimulation and theoretical considerations implicated to understand the role of differential cardiac reactivity in the behavioral context (e.g., approach-avoidance tendencies, orienting-defense responses).