Relief Emerges as an Offset-Locked Emotional Response: Self-Reported and Neural Evidence

Relief is commonly characterized as a sustained, low-arousal positive state; yet this static view obscures the dynamic temporal structure that emerges at stimulus termination. This study investigated the self-reported and neural dynamics of relief in 30 healthy adults using an offset-locked paradigm. Continuous self-reports and high-temporal-resolution electroencephalography (EEG) were recorded during the comparison of abrupt stimulus offsets with transient intensity modulations and sustained stimulation of aversive auditory stimuli. Stimulus offsets elicited the steepest self-reported rate of change and uniquely sustained shifts in affective state. At the neural level, the change in stimulation evoked a clear N1-P2 complex, with P2 mean amplitude (200-280 ms) larger than in the sustained condition at central and medial frontal sites. This early response did not distinguish transient modulation from complete termination and is therefore best characterized as a response to acoustic change rather than to relief itself; alpha-band amplitude over longer post-change windows showed no reliable condition differences. Together, these findings provide psychophysiological evidence that relief is better characterized as a discrete, offset-locked emotional event than as a passive return to affective baseline, and suggest that the detection of stimulus change may be dissociable from the affective evaluation that follows it. These findings offer new directions for affect dynamics research and challenge static conceptualizations of relief within dimensional models of emotion.