Skin conductance response and facial expressions of emotions
Date
2021
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Tartu Ülikool
Abstract
Emotional expressions provide strong signals in social interactions and can function as emotion inducers in a perceiver. The skin conductance response (SCR) is an objective, transient indication of autonomic nervous system arousal in response to an external emotional stimulus. The current study examined 118 healthy participants that were presented with three different types of emotional stimuli (Ekman's faces, verbal cues and IAPS pictures). The motions presented in the current experiment were six basic emotions (anger, happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise) and a neutral stimulus. The participants were asked to either mirror or express the presented emotion or suppress or exaggerate facial expression response to the pictorial stimuli while their electrodermal activity was recorded. As expected, affective stimuli elicited increased arousal measured by SCR, compared to the neutral stimuli. Modulating facial emotion expressions (in suppressing and exaggerating conditions) also resulted in higher SCR scores. Self-reported ratings in the exaggeration and suppression conditions mostly did not align with SCR scores but reflected a more robust emotion specific arousal pattern than SCR arousal. Arousal-based emotion differentiation patterns were more noticeable in lower arousal conditions, like mirroring or expressing facial emotions without a regulation task. Verbal stimuli did not
result in lower SCR scores than facial stimuli. Since conscious effort to modulate emotional face expressions resulted in higher SCR scores, but did not fully align with self-reported ratings on arousal, it was concluded that SCR does not reflect emotion specific arousal, but is an important tool to investigate in emotional regulation studies.
Description
Keywords
skin conductance response, emotion facial expressions, response modulation, suppression, exaggeration, arousal patterns, naha galvaaniline reaktsioon, naha elektrijuhtivus, emotsioonide näoväljendused, emotsionaalse reaktsiooni modulatsioon, emotsiooni-spetsiifiline aktiivsus