The Influence of Emotionally Relevant Context on the Evoked Cardiac Response Triggered by an Irrelevant Stimulus

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  • Michal Kuniecki
    Department of Psychophysiology, Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland
  • Robert Barry
    Brain & Behaviour Research Institute, and Department of Psychology, University of Wollongong, Australia
  • Jan Kaiser
    Department of Psychophysiology, Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland

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<jats:p>Abstract The effect of stimulus valence was examined in the evoked cardiac response (ECR) elicited by the exposition of neutral and negative slides as well as by an innocuous auditory stimulus presented on the affective foregrounds generated by the slides. The exposition of the aversive slide produced prolonged cardiac deceleration in comparison with the neutral slide. Similar prolonged deceleration accompanied exposition of the neutral auditory stimulus on the negative visual foreground in comparison with the neutral foreground. We interpret these results as an autonomic correlate of extended stimulus processing associated with the affective stimulus. The initial deceleration response, covering two or three slower heart beats, may be prolonged for several seconds before HR reaches the baseline level again. In such a case the evoked cardiac deceleration can be functionally divided into two parts: the reflexive bradycardia (ECR1) elicited by neutral stimuli and a late decelerative component (LDC). We can speculate that the latter is associated with an additional voluntary continuation of processing of the stimulus. This must involve some cognitive aspect different from the mental task performance which leads to the accelerative ECR2, and we suggest that processing of a stimulus with negative valence is involved in generating the LDC.</jats:p>

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