Minding the matter : the influence of bodily arousal on emotional information processing

Affect and cognition can be shaped by bodily states. Considerable research has indeed shown that facial and motor expressions influence the way in which emotional information is detected, assessed or memorized. However, comparatively little research has focused on the potential interplay between bodily arousal and emotional processing. In the present thesis, we examined whether changes in bodily arousal (i.e., heart rate) influence the processing of high and low arousal emotional stimuli. Our findings revealed a processing advantage for stimuli matching one’s current arousal state (e.g., being highly aroused while processing a highly arousing word such as “terror”). We observed that arousal-congruent stimuli benefit from higher report rates in an attentional blink paradigm (study 1), are detected faster in a constructive recognition task (study 2), and are evaluated as more familiar (study 3, compared to arousal-incongruent stimuli. We thus obtained converging evidence pointing towards the existence of an “arousal-congruency” effect while underlining the general importance of body-mind interactions.(PSYE - Sciences psychologiques et de l'éducation) -- UCL, 201