Does Personality Modulate Skin Conductance Responses to Emotional Stimuli?

peer reviewedSeveral studies showed that personality modulates emotional responsiveness, though most of them used subjective ratings as the measure of emotion. The present study extends personality-emotion relationship findings to psychophysiological methods, more precisely to skin conductance responses (SCRs). SCRs were recorded in 54 normal subjects following the presentation of neutral and emotional pictures. Results showed that half-recovery time was modulated by harm avoidance (HA) as a function of emotional valence: Low-HA subjects showed longer half-recovery time following the presentation of pleasant pictures relative to neutral ones, whereas high-HA subjects showed no extended half-recovery time. These results support the hypothesis that personality modulates some aspects of somatic emotional reactivity, and together with previous results, they suggest that this phenomenon is highly dependent upon the characteristics of the emotional material