Testing emotional response coherence assumptions: Comparing emotional versus non-emotional states

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Affective Science

Background:

• Emotional response coherence, the synchronization of physiological, experiential, and expressive systems, is central to emotion theories.
• Empirical evidence for response coherence has been inconsistent, challenging its role in defining emotional states.

Purpose of the Study:

• To test the assumption that response coherence characterizes the beginning and end of emotional states.
• To compare response coherence between emotional and non-emotional states.
• To examine changes in emotional coherence across different phases: anticipation, emotional experience, and recovery.

Main Methods:

• Seventy-nine participants viewed neutral, pleasant, and unpleasant film clips.
• Continuous self-reported emotional experience, autonomic physiological arousal (skin conductance level, heart rate), and facial expressions (corrugator, zygomatic activity) were recorded.
• Within-person cross-correlations analyzed response coherence across anticipation, viewing, and recovery phases.

Main Results:

• Emotional states showed higher experience-expression coherence compared to neutral states, indicating specificity.
• Coherence increased from anticipation to emotional viewing for experience-expression and experience-physiology (SCL) pairs.
• Only experience-corrugator activity coherence returned to baseline during recovery, as theoretically predicted.

Conclusions:

• Findings support the view of response coherence as a defining feature of emotional episodes, particularly between subjective experience and facial expressions.
• Emotional response coherence is dynamic, increasing during emotional episodes and returning to baseline during recovery.
• Future research should explore sympathetic arousal indices and the role of response coherence in emotional recovery.