Elisabeth Ruiz-Padial

Gender Differences in the Relationship Between Emotional Regulation and Depressive Symptoms

Reports of gender differences in depressive symptoms are one of the most pervasive findings in the literature. In addition, women are frequently reported to be more emotionally sensitive than men. However, the paradox of women being more emotionally responsive and yet at greater risk for psychopathology is still to be unraveled. In the present study we examined emotional regulation as a possible factor in the gender difference in depressive symptom reporting. In a sample of young adults we replicated the frequently reported finding of greater depressive symptom reporting in women. In addition, we found women to report greater attention to emotions. This is consistent with the idea that women tend to think more and ruminate more about their emotions. However, when the variance associated with this greater attention to emotions was statistically controlled, the gender difference in depressive symptoms was no longer significant. Subsequent analyses found that women with low depressive symptoms reported greater attention to emotions without evidencing greater depressive symptoms. However, women with high depressive symptoms exhibited greater attention to emotions, more impaired antirumination emotional repair strategies, and greater reports of depressive symptoms than men with high depressive symptoms. We close by speculating about the neural concomitants of these findings.

The rhythm of the heart in the blink of an eye: Emotion-modulated startle magnitude covaries with heart rate variability

Emotion-modulated startle is a robust phenomenon that has been demonstrated in a wide range of experimental situations. Similarly, heart rate variability (HRV) has been associated with a diverse range of processes including affective and attentional regulation. The present study sought to examine the relationship between these two important measures of affective behavior. Ninety female participants viewed pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant pictures while exposed to acoustic startle stimuli. The eyeblink startle was recorded both during the affective foregrounds and during intertrial intervals. HRV was assessed during a resting baseline and relationships between HRV and startle magnitudes examined. Results indicated that resting HRV was inversely related to startle magnitude during both intertrial intervals and affective foregrounds. In addition, the participants with the highest HRV showed the most differentiated emotion-modulated startle effects, whereas those with the lowest HRV, compared to those with the highest HRV, showed significantly potentiated startle to neutral foregrounds and marginally potentiated startle to pleasant foregrounds. The findings are consistent with models that posit that prefrontal cortical activity modulates subcortical motivation circuits. These results have important implications for the use of startle probe methodology and for HRV in the study of emotional regulation and dysregulation.

Estimating respiratory frequency from autoregressive spectral analysis of heart period

In this article we report the results of a pilot study and a larger investigation that examined the relationship between respiration frequency assessed using the traditional mercury strain gauge and using the central frequency of the HF component derived from autoregressive spectral analysis.

The effect of conscious and non-conscious presentation of biologically relevant emotion pictures on emotion modulated startle and phasic heart rate.

Many researchers have proposed an emotion regulation circuit that includes the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. LeDoux (1996) has proposed that there are two pathways by which emotion information is processed. A fast route that bypasses the prefrontal cortex to allow rapid response to potential threat, and a slower route that includes the prefrontal cortex and allows modulation of bottom-up inputs. We investigated these pathways and their peripheral manifestations using emotional pictures presented for either 30 milliseconds or 6 seconds. 36 female participants were randomly assigned to view pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral pictures that varied in viewing time while the eyeblink startle magnitude and phasic heart rate (HR) responses were recorded. Significant Group by Valence interactions were found for both startle and heart rate responses. For the 6 second condition the expected emotion modulated startle effect was found with a larger startle for unpleasant and smaller startles for pleasant foregrounds relative to neutral pictures. For HR, the D1 component was larger for pleasant and unpleasant foregrounds compared to the neutral and the A1 component was larger for the unpleasant compared to the pleasant and the neutral. For the 30 millisecond condition, startle magnitudes were larger for the pleasant and unpleasant compared to the neutral. Whereas the HR response showed the expected tri-phasic profile there were no significant between valence differences. These results suggest that briefly presented emotion stimuli access the fast route of emotion recognition perhaps via the amygdala. The 6 second presentations allow the prefrontal cortex to modulate the bottom up inputs and thus produce a context appropriate response.

Fearful and Sexual Pictures Not Consciously Seen Modulate the Startle Reflex in Human Beings

BACKGROUND Animal and human studies consistently have demonstrated that the startle reflex elicited by intense auditory stimulation is enhanced by the previous presentation of fear-evoking stimuli. There is also growing and varied evidence of the nonconscious processing of fear stimuli in human beings eliciting brain and autonomic fear responses. METHODS We report two studies using the startle probe paradigm and the backward-masking procedure to examine the modulation of the eye-blink component of the startle reflex by consciously and nonconsciously presented emotional pictures. RESULTS Conscious and nonconscious presentation of fearful pictures amplified the magnitude of the startle reflex in both studies. The opposite tendency was observed for conscious and nonconscious presentation of sexually attractive pictures in the second study. CONCLUSIONS These findings support the notion that negative (and possibly positive) biologically relevant stimuli can be nonconsciously processed, presumably via amygdala activation, and can affect behavioral responding.

Decomposing unpleasantness: Differential exogenous attention to disgusting and fearful stimuli

Negative stimuli have consistently been shown to efficiently attract exogenous attention. Two different types of unpleasant stimuli, disgusting and fearful, sharing similar arousal and valence, are usually employed as a single category. However, since they diverge in several important aspects (biological functionality, associated feelings, and central and peripheral physiological correlates), it may be expected that their potential to capture attention differs. Event-related potentials and behavioral indices were recorded while participants were engaged in a digit categorization task in response to three types of irrelevant, distracting pictures: disgusting, fearful and neutral. Disgusting trials were associated with worse performance than fearful trials in the digit categorization task as revealed by reaction times and number of errors. Moreover, P2-associated cuneus activation and scalp anterior P2 amplitude were greater for disgusting than for fearful distracters. All these indices reveal that, under the experimental conditions employed in the present study, disgusting distracters are more efficient at attracting exogenous attention than are fearful distracters.

A new look at cardiac defense: Attention or emotion?

The study of cardiac defense has a long tradition in psychological research both within the cognitive approach--linked to Pavlov, Sokolov, and Grahams work on sensory reflexes--and within the motivational one--linked to the work of Cannon and subsequent researchers on the concepts of activation and stress. These two approaches have been difficult to reconcile in the past. We summarize a series of studies on cardiac defense from a different perspective, which allows integration of the traditional approaches. This new perspective emphasizes a sequential process interpretation of the cardiac defense response. Results of descriptive and parametric studies, as well as those of studies examining the physiological and psychological mechanisms underlying the response, show a complex response pattern with both accelerative and decelerative components, with both sympathetic and parasympathetic influences, and with both attentional and emotional significance. The implications of this new look at cardiac defense are discussed in relation to defensive reactions in natural settings, the brain mechanisms controlling such reactions, and their effects on health and illness.

Habituation and sensitization of protective reflexes: Dissociation between cardiac defense and eye-blink startle

We examined the habituation and recovery of two protective reflexes, cardiac defense and eye-blink startle, simultaneously elicited by a white noise of 500ms as a function of the time interval between stimulus presentations. Participants were 90 volunteers (54 women) randomly distributed into 6 inter-trial interval (ITI) conditions. They all received three presentations of the stimulus with a time interval of 30min between the first and third noise. The timing of the second noise was manipulated in six steps, using a between-group design, in order to increase the ITI between Trials 1 and 2 and symmetrically decrease the ITI between Trials 2 and 3. Cardiac defense showed fast habituation at the shortest ITI (2.5min), but reduced habituation and increased recovery at the longest ITI (27.5min). In contrast, eye-blink startle showed sensitization irrespective of the ITI. This pattern of findings highlights dissociations between protective reflexes when simultaneously examined. The results are discussed in the context of the cascade model of defense reactions.

Effect of Heart Rate Variability on Defensive Reaction and Eating Disorder Symptomatology in Chocolate Cravers

The study examines the effect of heart rate variability (HRV) on the cardiac defence response (CDR) and eating disorder symptomatology in chocolate cravers. Female chocolate cravers (n = 36) and noncravers (n = 36) underwent a psychophysiological test to assess their HRV during a 5-min rest period, followed by three trials to explore the CDR, elicited by an intense white noise, during the viewing of chocolate, neutral, and unpleasant pictures. After the test, participants completed a questionnaire to measure eating disorder symptomatology. The HRV was inversely related to the magnitude of the CDR and to eating disorder symptomatology in chocolate cravers. In addition, the HRV was inversely related to the magnitude of the CDR when viewing unpleasant pictures but not to neutral or chocolate ones, across all participants. These findings support the idea that poor autonomic regulation, indexed by low HRV, plays a relevant role in food craving and uncontrolled eating behavior.

Resting heart rate variability and the startle reflex to briefly presented affective pictures.

We have previously shown that persons with low HRV showed potentiated startle responses to neutral stimuli. In the present study we replicated our prior findings and extended them to examine the effects of HRV on the startle magnitude to pictures that were presented outside of conscious awareness. A total of 85 male and female students were stratified via median split on their resting HRV. They were presented pictures for 6 s or for 30 ms. Results indicated that the high HRV group showed the context appropriate startle magnitude increase to unpleasant foreground. The low HRV group showed startle magnitude increase from pleasant to neutral pictures but no difference between the neutral and unpleasant pictures. This pattern of results was similar for the 30 ms and the 6 s conditions. These results suggest that having high HRV may allow persons to more efficiently process emotional stimuli and to better recognize threat and safety signals.