Browsing by Subject "Arousal"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Does social content influence the subjective evaluation of affective pictures?
    (Cambridge University Press, 2020-05-28) Kosonogov, Vladimir; Torrente, Ginesa; Carrillo Verdejo, María Eduvigis; Martínez Selva, José María; Sánchez Navarro, Juan Pedro; Anatomía Humana y Psicobiología
    This study explored the effect of the perceived social content of affective pictures on the subjective evaluation of affective valence and arousal. For this purpose, we established three categories of social content (pictures without people, with one person and with two or more people). A sample of 161 subjects rated 200 pictures varying in affective valence (unpleasant, neutral, and pleasant), arousal and social content. Results of two-factor analysis of variance (F(4, 157) = 71.7, p < .001, ηp 2 = .31) showed that perceived social content influenced the ratings of affective valence, specially for unpleasant pictures, with the greatest social content (two or more people) leading subjects to rate unpleasant pictures with the lowest ratings (all pairwise comparisons’ p < .001). Regarding arousal (F(4, 157) = 64.0, p < .001, ηp 2 = .29), the higher the social content, the higher the arousal ratings, but only for pleasant (all pairwise comparisons’ p < .007) and unpleasant (all pairwise comparisons’ p < .001) pictures. Overall, this study demonstrated an effect of the perceived social content on the subjective evaluation of affective valence and arousal of emotional stimuli.
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    Effectiveness of a mindfulness Intervention program on different indicators of stress and anxiety in primary school students aged 9 to 12 years
    (Universidad de Murcia. Servicio de Publicaciones, 2025-10) Pérez Segoviano, Luz Elvira; Aguilar-Zavala, Herlinda; Hidalgo, Vanesa; Villada, Carolina; Sin departamento asociado
    Introduction: Late childhood or preadolescence is an important period of development in which high levels of anxiety and stress can occur due to physical and psychological changes; the efficacy of interventions such as mindfulness in reducing stress and anxiety at these ages has been under-examined. This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a mind-fulness intervention program on different indicators of stress and anxiety in primary school students aged 9 to 12 years belonging to a public primary school. Method: through a longitudinal and quasi-experimental study, 125 children were evaluated in anxiety (STAIC), Stress (IIEC), emotional va-lence, arousal, perceived self-control (SAM), and salivary cortisol, before, during, and after the intervention (14 sessions in 5 weeks, three sessions a week, 40 minutes/session). The child population was made up of sixty-three children who participated in an intervention group, and sixty-two children were enrolled in the control group (waist list). Results: After the in-tervention, a noteworthy decrease in the levels of perceived stress at school, arousal, and cortisol in saliva was observed. Conclusions: Mindful-ness appears to be an appropriate tool for reducing perceived stress, par-ticularly in the school setting, as it reduces perceived arousal and lowers cortisol levels after one month of intervention.
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    EmoPro – Emotional prototypicality for 1286 Spanish words: Relationships with affective and psycholinguistic variables
    (The Psychonomic Society, Inc., 2021-01) Pérez-Sánchez, Miguel Ángel; Stadthagen-Gonzalez, Hans; Guasch, Marc; Hinojosa, José Antonio; Fraga, Isabel; Marín, Javier; Ferré, Pilar; Psicología Básica y Metodología; Department of Psychology, The University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS, USA; Department of Psychology and CRAMC, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Carretera de Valls, s/n, 43007 Tarragona, Spain; Instituto Pluridisciplinar, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain; Dpto. Psicología Experimental, Procesos Cognitivos y Logopedia, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain; Facultad de Lenguas y Educación, Universidad de Nebrija, Madrid, Spain; Cognitive Processes & Behavior Research Group, Department of Social Psychology, Basic Psychology, and Methodology, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
    We present EmoPro, a normative study of the emotion lexicon of the Spanish language. We provide emotional prototypicality ratings for 1286 emotion words (i.e., those that refer to human emotions such as “fear” or “happy”), belonging to different grammatical categories. This is the largest data set for this variable so far. Each word was rated by at least 20 participants, and adequate reliability and validity rates for prototypicality scores were found. We also provide new affective (valence, arousal, emotionality, happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, and anger) and psycholinguistic (Age-of-Acquisition, frequency and concreteness) ratings for those words without prior data in the extant literature, and analyze which of the given variables contribute the most to prototypicality. A factor analysis on the affective and psycholinguistic variables has shown that prototypicality loads in a factor associated to the emotional salience of words. Furthermore, a regression analysis reveals a significant role of both dimensional and discrete- emotion-related variables, as well as a modest effect of AoA and frequency on the prediction of prototypicality. Cross-linguistic comparisons show that the pattern obtained here is similar to that observed in other languages. EmoPro norms will be highly valuable for researchers in the field, providing them with a tool to select the most representative emotion words in Spanish for their experimental (e.g., for a comparison with emotion-laden words, such as “murder” or “party”) or applied studies (e.g., to examine the acquisition of emotion words/concepts in children). The full set of norms is available as supplementary material.
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    Head motion elicited by affective pictures as measured by a new LED-based technique
    (Brill Academic Publishers, 2019-04-26) Kosonogov, Vladimir; Torrente Hernández, Ginesa; Arenas Dalla Vecchia, Aurelio; Carrillo Verdejo, María Eduvigis; Martínez Selva, José María; Sánchez Navarro, Juan Pedro; Electromagnetismo y Electrónica
    The complex sensory input and motor reflexes that keep body posture and head position aligned are influenced by emotional reactions evoked by visual or auditory stimulation. Several theoretical approaches have emphasized the relevance of motor reactions in emotional response. Emotions are considered as a tendency or predisposition to act that depends on two motivational systems in the brain — the appetitive system, related to approach behaviours, and the defensive system, related to withdrawal or fight-or-flight behaviours. Few studies on emotion have been conducted employing kinematic methods, however. Motion analysis of the head may be a promising method for studying the impact of viewing affective pictures on emotional response. For this purpose, we presented unpleasant, neutral and pleasant affective pictures. Participants were instructed to view the pictures and to remain still. Two light-emitting diodes (LEDs) were attached to the foreheads of participants, and a Wii Remote controller, positioned 25 cm away, detected the position of the LEDs in the medial–lateral and anterior–posterior axes. We found more sway in response to unpleasant pictures. In addition, unpleasant pictures also provoked faster movements than both neutral and pleasant pictures. This response to unpleasant pictures, in contrast to pleasant ones, might reflect the readiness or predisposition to act. Our data also revealed that men moved faster than women, which is in accordance with previous findings related to gender differences.
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    Impact of 'last experience' on affect after exercise reaching the anaerobic threshold: A laboratory investigation
    (Universidad de Murcia. Servicio de publicaciones, 2021) Laki, Ádám; Ihász, Ferenc; de la Vega Marcos, Ricardo; Ruiz Barquín, Roberto; Szabo, Attila
    The affective benefits of a single bout of exercise are widely reported, but several factors influence the affect measured after exercise. One is the last experiencelinked to the exercise session. In this laboratory study, we manipulated progressive treadmill exercise to ventilatory threshold by using cognitive tasks during and immediately after the exercise whenwe gauged affect and compared it to pre-exercise baseline. We assumed that the affective responses after exercise would mirror feeling states associated with the very last experience(i.e., the cognitive task) rather than exercise. We examined a total of 53 athletes assigned to exercise or no-exercise control group. In addition to heart rates, positive and negative affect, feeling state, and perceived arousal were measured before and after the intervention. The results revealed substantial improvements in affect in both groups, based on large effect sizes. The lack of difference in the dependent measures between the exercise and no-exercise control group may suggest that both groups responded to the same last experience (i.e., cognitive task), and the effects of exercise and sitting (control) were wiped out. These findings imply that pre-to post-intervention exercise investigations testing the psychological benefits of a single bout of exercise may not measure what they intend to measure, but merely the affective responses to the last experience or event before answering the questionnaire(s). In brief, many hundreds of studies' internal reliability, employing the pre/post protocols, may be questionable.