The Perception of Aversiveness of Surgical Procedure Pictures Is Modulated by Personal/Occupational Relevance

Abstract

It is well established that emotions are organized around two motivational systems: the defensive and the appetitive. Individual differences are relevant factors in emotional reactions, making them more flexible and less stereotyped. There is evidence that health professionals have lower emotional reactivity when viewing scenes of situations involving pain. The objective of this study was to investigate whether the rating of pictures of surgical procedure depends on their personal/occupational relevance. Fifty-two female Nursing (health discipline) and forty-eight Social Work (social science discipline) students participated in the experiment, which consisted of the presentation of 105 images of different categories (e.g., neutral, food), including 25 images of surgical procedure. Volunteers judged each picture according to its valence (pleasantness) and arousal using the Self-Assessment Manikin scale (dimensional approach). Additionally, the participants chose the word that best described what they felt while viewing each image (discrete emotion perspective). The average valence score for surgical procedure pictures for the Nursing group (M = 4.57; SD = 1.02) was higher than the score for the Social Work group (M = 3.31; SD = 1.05), indicating that Nursing students classified those images as less unpleasant than the Social Work students did. Additionally, the majority of Nursing students (65.4%) chose “neutral” as the word that best described what they felt while viewing the pictures. In the Social Work group, disgust (54.2%) was the emotion that was most frequently chosen. The evaluation of emotional stimuli differed according to the groups' personal/occupational relevance: Nursing students judged pictures of surgical procedure as less unpleasant than the Social Work students did, possibly reflecting an emotional regulation skill or some type of habituation that is critically relevant to their future professional work.

Effect of Clinical Traineeship on the Emotional Dimensions (Valence and Arousal) among Nurses Student

“…Nevertheless, the study showed a significant difference between the group before clinical traineeship and the group after clinical traineeship in terms of the valence. This finding is different from Paes et all results which revealed no significant difference between a group of nurses and a social group when evaluating negative images from IAPS (11).…”

“…Convinced to the importance of these tools, several studies have been carried out, many studies from America [1,4,5,7], and other studies have been conducted in various parts of the world: In France [8,9], in Brazil [10][11][12], in Germany [13], in China [14,15], in Korea [16], in Lithuania [17], in Belgique [18] and in Iran [19,20].…”

Appetitive drives for ultra-processed food products and the ability of text warnings to counteract consumption predispositions

“…The IAPS emotional categories were neutral (objects, people, animals and plants), pleasant (from low to high arousal: happy families, babies and puppies, nature scenes, sports and erotica) and unpleasant (from low to high arousal: pollution, loss, disgusting, disease, violence and mutilated bodies). The use of different IAPS pictures as backgrounds, varying in valence and arousal, served as the affective bases of comparison during the evaluation of the target pictures, thus anchoring the emotional rating scales ( 20 , 24 , 25 ) . This standard procedure provides valid between-group ratings, as previously noted ( 20 , 25 , 26 , 48 ) .…”

“…The use of different IAPS pictures as backgrounds, varying in valence and arousal, served as the affective bases of comparison during the evaluation of the target pictures, thus anchoring the emotional rating scales (20,24,25) . This standard procedure provides valid between-group ratings, as previously noted (20,25,26,48) .…”

“…The following two essential properties of the standardization method apply to the IAPS: (i) the emotional responses evoked by each picture are determined based on the average ratings of a group of participants; and (ii) the rating sessions must include pictures eliciting emotions ranging from an extremely negative to an extremely positive valence and from low to high levels of arousal. These properties will provide valid measures of evocativeness per picture that can be extrapolated to other individuals and groups, thereby facilitating between-group comparisons ( 20 , 25 ) . The valence and arousal ratings obtained with this method correlate with physiological responses to emotional visual cues and are, to an extent, considered an index of motivational tendencies that drive appetitive (‘approach-like’) or defensive (‘avoidance-like’) responses to stimuli ( 26 , 27 ) .…”