Emotional Imagery: Effect of Autonomic Response Information on Physiological Arousal

Abstract

This paper reports two experiments which examined the effect of manipulating the informational structure of fear-provoking mental images on physiological arousal. The subjects, females with fear of rats selected on the basis of self-report and behavioural indices of fear, after training in stimulus imagination, response imagination or no-training, underwent a laboratory session in which they were requested to imagine scenes from scripts of different propositional structure and different emotional content while their heart rate and skin resistance were recorded. The results of both experiments showed that Training in response imagination, independently of Type of script, produced higher heart rate activation during the description or imagination of fear-provoking scenes than Training in stimulus imagination. This effect was only detected when the no-training group was excluded from the analysis. The results are discussed in relation to Lang's bio-informational theory of emotional imagery.