Beyond valence: The differential effect of masked anger and sadness stimuli on effort‐related cardiac response

Abstract

This experiment investigated the moderating effect of masked anger versus sadness primes on objective task difficulty's impact on effort-related cardiovascular response. Cardiovascular measures (ICG and blood pressure) were assessed during a habituation period and an easy versus difficult short-term memory task during which participants were exposed to masked emotional facial expressions. As expected, sadness primes led to stronger cardiac preejection period (PEP) responses than anger primes when the task was easy. When the task was difficult, we observed the reversed pattern. Here, anger primes led to stronger PEP reactivity than sadness primes. Heart rate responses described the corresponding pattern. The results demonstrate that masked anger and sadness primes have different effects on cardiac response in easy and difficult tasks. The effect of anger primes resembles the facilitating effect of happiness primes observed in previous studies.

Implicit Affect Primes Effort: Basic Processes, Moderators, and Boundary Conditions

“…Finally, Freydefont and Gendolla () found that high performance‐contingent monetary incentive could eliminate the effort mobilization deficit of people primed with sadness during a difficult task. We replicated the difficult condition of the Freydefont et al () experiment and found that high monetary incentive led to strong PEP reactivity in the sadness‐prime condition, while low incentive resulted in low effort. Incentive had no effect in an implicit anger condition, which fell in between these cells.…”

“…Another experiment (Freydefont, Gendolla, & Silvestrini, ) tested if anger primes have a similar effect as happiness primes, as posited by the IAPE model, and if the affect prime effects are emotion category or valence specific. Therefore, participants were exposed to primes of two different negative emotions – anger versus sadness – during an easy versus difficult version of a Sternberg‐type short‐term memory task.…”

“…Means and standard errors of cardiac pre‐ejection period reactivity (in ms) during task performance in the experiment by Freydefont, Gendolla, and Silvestrini (). Copyright: Blackwell (reprinted with permission).…”

Not everyone's heart contracts to reward: Insensitivity to varying levels of reward in dysphoria

“…However, there are also several important exceptions that found evidence for motivational intensity theory's predictions on cardiac measures but not on SBP (e.g., Annis et al, 2001;Freydefont, Gendolla, & Silvestrini, 2012;Richter, 2010).…”

Influence of positive subliminal and supraliminal affective cues on goal pursuit in schizophrenia

“…Negative emotions related to anger and aggression share an important motivational property with positive emotion (Carver and HarmonJones, 2009). We thus explored whether negative pictures can also induce disengagement in goal pursuit (Freydefont et al, 2012). Influence of the subliminal and supraliminal affective pictures on goal pursuit and perseverance were examined by measuring how they modulated the number of successive correct responses and event related potentials (ERPs).…”