Dr. Vrana wishes to assess the startle reflex response as a measure of the affective valence dimension of emotion during discrete emotional contexts (joy, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and relaxation). He also wishes to examine the relationship between attentional and emotional modulation of the startle response. The first study generates the specific emotional contexts employed in later experiments. A tone-cued imagery procedure is used, in which college students imagine various emotional contexts and at specific signal tones. The startle response is examined under specific emotional contexts to determine if it: 1) increases in a linear manner with decreasing emotional valence during imagery (smallest to largest for joy, neutral, and fear, respectively), 2) is inhibited by sensory-modality specific or general sensory withdrawal (e.g., will attentional requirements during disgust, which calls for sensory withdrawal, result in different modulation patterns than attentional requirements during processing of neutral sensory information?), 3) by the pleasant-unpleasant (e.g., startle facilitation during anger) or approach-withdrawal (e.g., startle inhibition during anger) aspect of the valence dimension, and 4) by reflex priming for action or the aversive nature of the emotion (e.g., is startle facilitated by sadness/depression?). Self-reports of affective valence, arousal, dominance, and vividness will be collected for all imaginal experiences. For imagery designed to elicit specific emotions, reports of joy, fear, anger, disgust, surprise, and sadness also will be collected. The emotion ratings as well as corrugator and zygomatic facial muscle activity will serve as convergent measures of the emotions elicited during imagery. Heat rate, skin conductance, skin temperature, and facial muscle activity will be recorded to investigate several hypotheses about physiological response patterns during processing of specific emotions.
