Emotional & electroencephalographic responses during affective picture viewing after exercise

Effects of Emotional Exposure on State Anxiety after Acute Exercise

“…Electroencephalographic (EEG) responses during affective picture viewing were also reported to be unaffected by acute exercise or seated rest (10). Although state anxiety was reduced after Affective ratings of pictures were missing for two subjects. "…”

“…Another recent study reported that attentional bias toward pleasant and unpleasant IAPS pictures was not changed after acute exercise (3), suggesting that subjective appraisal of specific single instances of emotional stimuli is unaltered after the exercise has ended. The failure of acute exercise to alter psychophysiological responsiveness during the actual viewing of an arousing pleasant or unpleasant stimulus (10,34) suggests that the neural systems that process and respond to specific instances of emotion remain undisturbed. Despite intact emotional responsiveness to briefly presented visual stimuli, the current study suggests that acute exercise may protect one from the cumulative effects of exposure to a variety of arousing emotional stimuli (32).…”

“…Furthermore, Smith et al (32) have reported that reactivity during repeated exposure to emotional stimuli is sensitive to selfreported state anxiety. This suggests that anxiety-reducing ti-eatments, such as acute exercise or quiet rest, may modify the cumulative effects of exposure to emotionally arousing stimuli (10).…”

A genetic perspective on the association between exercise and mental health

“…The immediate aversive effects caused by exercise-related fatigue related to monoamine depletion (Davis & Bailey, 1997) may depend on genetic differences in monoaminergic systems, whereas the extent of immediate rewarding effects may well depend on genetic variation in the opioid and dopamine systems (Simonen, Rankinen, Perusse, Leon, et al, 2003). Acute exercise has striking effects on neural activity, evident in EEG (Crabbe, Smith, & Dishman, 2007) and PET recordings (Williamson, McColl, & Mathews, 2003Williamson, McColl, Mathews, Ginsburg, & Mitchell, 1999). This activity is partly caused by feed forward motor commands and partly by afferent feedback signals from active muscles.…”

Lessons in exercise neurobiology: The case of endorphins

“…We focus on mood here because most of the relevant literature has used mood measures. Elsewhere we have emphasized the potential usefulness of measuring other aspects of affective experience (Crabbe, Smith, & Dishman, 2007;Smith & O'Connor, 2003).…”