Cardiovascular differentiation of emotions.

Abstract

This study examined the cardiovascular mechanisms governing differential blood pressure changes during the emotions of joy, sadness, fear, and anger. Heart rate, blood pressure, stroke volume, peripheral vascular resistance, cardiac output, and indices of myocardial contractility were measured during fear, anger, joy, sadness, physical action, and neutral imagery conditions in 27 right-handed male volunteers screened for imagery ability, alexithymia, anxiety, and depression. Anger imagery, rather than fear, was accompanied by the largest effects on the cardiovascular system. Increased diastolic blood pressure in anger was associated with maintained levels of peripheral vascular resistance and increased cardiac output and heart rate compared with changes during neutral imagery. Sadness produced a distinct pattern with moderate increases in blood pressure and vascular resistance and a decrease in cardiac output compared with changes during neutral imagery. Fear, action, and joy produced similar blood pressure changes in which systolic pressure increased and diastolic pressure was relatively unchanged. The measurement of cardiac output and determination of vascular resistance changes during emotional imagery demonstrate that previously observed emotion-specific blood pressure responses are produced by underlying patterns of cardiovascular activation, which differ between the major categories of emotions.

Neuroanatomical correlates of externally and internally generated human emotion

“…While this study and others (6) suggest that the observed increases in regional brain activity cannot be completely attributed to aspects of the tasks that are unrelated to emotion, additional studies are needed to consider this issue further. Additional studies are also needed to determine the extent to which modality-specific sensory association areas and anterior temporal lobe structures participate in the emotional response to other kinds of exteroceptive sensory stimuli, the extent to which anterior temporal lobe structures participate in internally generated fear (an emotion that is distinguished from the target emotions elicited in this study by consistent increases in autonomic activity [42,43]), and the extent to which our findings can be generalized to males, different age groups, people who are not right-handed, individuals who vary in their ability to have intense emotions, and those who are not instructed to feel the target emotion.…”

Revisiting the lack of association between affect and physiology: Contrasting between-person and within-person analyses.

“…Conducting these analyses requires having single data points for anger and BP to compare across people, which can mean aggregating variables (e.g., calculating a difference score between anger at baseline and after an argument). These between-person approaches have successfully been used to show that those who are provoked during a task involving active coping were those with the greatest cardiovascular activity (Bongard, Pfeiffer, al'Absi, Hodapp, & Linnenkemper, 1997), that different emotions produce distinct cardiovascular profiles (Sinha, Lovallo, & Parsons, 1992), and that coherence between responding to anger provocation was higher when comparing within systems (automatic and reflexive) versus across them (Evers et al, 2014).…”

Striking a chord: Moods, blood pressure, and heart rate in everyday life

“…In the laboratory, various methods are used to induce specific emotional states and determine how they may be differentiated physiologically (for example, Sinha, Lovallo, & Parsons, 1992). In everyday life, however, emotional experiences and reactions are not unitary, and they vary in their duration, complexity, and intensity.…”