Coherence and divergence in autonomic-subjective affective space

Hélio Clemente José Cuve; Joseph Harper; Caroline Catmur; Geoffrey Bird

doi:10.1111/psyp.14262

Coherence and divergence in autonomic-subjective affective space

Hélio Clemente José Cuve, Joseph Harper, Caroline Catmur, Geoffrey Bird

Psychology

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

A central tenet of many theories of emotion is that emotional states are accompanied by distinct patterns of autonomic activity. However, experimental studies of coherence between subjective and autonomic responses during emotional states provide little evidence of coherence. Crucially, previous studies investigating coherence have either adopted univariate approaches or made limited use of multivariate analytic approaches by investigating subjective and autonomic responses separately. The current study addressed this question using a multivariate dimensional approach to build a common autonomic-subjective affective space incorporating subjective responses and three different autonomic signals (heart rate, skin conductance response, and pupil diameter), measured during an emotion-inducing task, in 51 participants. Results showed that autonomic and subjective responses could be adequately described in a two-dimensional affective space. The first dimension included contributions from subjective and autonomic responses, indicating coherence, while contributions to the second dimension were almost exclusively of autonomic covariance. Thus, while there was a degree of coherence between autonomic and subjective emotional responses, there was substantial structure in autonomic responses that did not covary with subjective emotional experience. This study, therefore, contributes new insights into the relationship between subjective and autonomic emotional responses, and provides a framework for future multimodal emotion research, enabling both hypothesis- and data-driven testing.

Original language	English
Article number	e14262
Journal	Psychophysiology
Early online date	5 Feb 2023
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.14262
Publication status	E-pub ahead of print - 5 Feb 2023

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title = "Coherence and divergence in autonomic-subjective affective space",

abstract = "A central tenet of many theories of emotion is that emotional states are accompanied by distinct patterns of autonomic activity. However, experimental studies of coherence between subjective and autonomic responses during emotional states provide little evidence of coherence. Crucially, previous studies investigating coherence have either adopted univariate approaches or made limited use of multivariate analytic approaches by investigating subjective and autonomic responses separately. The current study addressed this question using a multivariate dimensional approach to build a common autonomic-subjective affective space incorporating subjective responses and three different autonomic signals (heart rate, skin conductance response, and pupil diameter), measured during an emotion-inducing task, in 51 participants. Results showed that autonomic and subjective responses could be adequately described in a two-dimensional affective space. The first dimension included contributions from subjective and autonomic responses, indicating coherence, while contributions to the second dimension were almost exclusively of autonomic covariance. Thus, while there was a degree of coherence between autonomic and subjective emotional responses, there was substantial structure in autonomic responses that did not covary with subjective emotional experience. This study, therefore, contributes new insights into the relationship between subjective and autonomic emotional responses, and provides a framework for future multimodal emotion research, enabling both hypothesis- and data-driven testing.",

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note = "Funding Information: HCC was supported by a Medical Sciences Division Graduate Studentship awarded by the Clarendon Fund and the Kendrew Fund (St John's College, University of Oxford). GB was supported by the Baily Thomas Charitable Trust. This work was partly funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (Grant: ES/R007527/1). Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2023 The Authors. Psychophysiology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for Psychophysiological Research.",

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AU - Bird, Geoffrey

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PY - 2023/2/5

Y1 - 2023/2/5

N2 - A central tenet of many theories of emotion is that emotional states are accompanied by distinct patterns of autonomic activity. However, experimental studies of coherence between subjective and autonomic responses during emotional states provide little evidence of coherence. Crucially, previous studies investigating coherence have either adopted univariate approaches or made limited use of multivariate analytic approaches by investigating subjective and autonomic responses separately. The current study addressed this question using a multivariate dimensional approach to build a common autonomic-subjective affective space incorporating subjective responses and three different autonomic signals (heart rate, skin conductance response, and pupil diameter), measured during an emotion-inducing task, in 51 participants. Results showed that autonomic and subjective responses could be adequately described in a two-dimensional affective space. The first dimension included contributions from subjective and autonomic responses, indicating coherence, while contributions to the second dimension were almost exclusively of autonomic covariance. Thus, while there was a degree of coherence between autonomic and subjective emotional responses, there was substantial structure in autonomic responses that did not covary with subjective emotional experience. This study, therefore, contributes new insights into the relationship between subjective and autonomic emotional responses, and provides a framework for future multimodal emotion research, enabling both hypothesis- and data-driven testing.

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Coherence and divergence in autonomic-subjective affective space

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