Personal Relevance is an Important Dimension for Visceral Reactivity in Emotional Imagery

Abstract

Individually constructed and standard anxiety and anger scripts were compared to examine the importance of personal relevance in responses to emotional imagery. Forty healthy volunteers were presented with 10 scripts (two standard anxiety; two standard anger; two neutral; two action and one anger and one anxiety, which the subjects constructed themselves). The subjects were not selected for their imaging ability. The scripts contained response imagery and instructions and the subjects reported imagining themselves as participants rather than observers in the scenes. The subjects were most likely to use a visual strategy. The most common themes for the personal scripts were performance anxiety and anger at injustice. The personal scripts were perceived as vivid and controllable and showed the greatest responses on self-rated emotion and psychophysiological measures. These results suggest that pesonal relevance is an important dimension for visceral reactivity in emotional imagery and lend support to appraisal theories of emotion.