TY - THES A1 - Schmidt, Barbara T1 - Taking your chances: risk behavior and its relation to arousal, framing and motivation T1 - Die eigenen Chancen ergreifen: Risikoverhalten und dessen Beziehung zu Arousal, Framing und Motivation N2 - Human risk behavior is the subject of growing research in the field of psychology as well as economics. One central topic is the influence of psychological variables on risk behavior. Studies contained in this work investigated the impact of arousal, framing and motivation on risk behavior. Arousal can on the one hand be a temporarily stable trait and on the other hand a situation-dependent variable. We showed that low trait arousal, measured via resting heart rate, predicted risky behavior. After physical exercise, state arousal was heightened in the experiment. Participants tended to act less risky after physical exercise. Taken together, the results suggest an inverse relation of arousal and risk behavior. Most studies investigating risk behavior employ a payment method that we call pay-one method: although the gambles that are used consist of many trials, only one trial is paid out. We investigated the effect of the payment method on risk behavior by employing both the pay-one and a pay-all method, which pays out all trials, in a within-subjects design. We found that participants acted about 10% less risky in the pay-one condition compared to the pay-all condition. This result suggests that risk-aversion is over-estimated in common risk paradigms that use the pay-one method. When we worked on a hard task before, we like to engage in a more likable task afterwards. That observation led to the general classification of tasks in want-to and have-to tasks. Our body system strives towards a balance between those two task types in the sense of a homeostasis. We assessed event-related potentials (ERPs) in a risk game that we treated as a want-to task. When participants worked on a difficult have-to task before, amplitudes of the ERP-components in the risk game were raised compared to a condition where participants worked on an easy task before. We conclude that the motivation shift towards a want-to task after a have-to task can be assessed via ERP amplitudes. In conclusion, it was shown that arousal, framing and motivation are important psychological variables that influence risk behavior. The specific mechanisms of these influences have been investigated and discussed. N2 - Menschliches Risikoverhalten ist zunehmend Gegenstand psychologischer und ökonomischer Forschung. Eine zentrale Rolle spielt dabei der Einfluss psychologischer Variablen auf Risikoverhalten. Die in dieser Arbeit vorgestellten Studien untersuchen den Einfluss von physiologischer Erregung, Framing und Motivation auf Risikoverhalten. Physiologische Erregung kann einerseits als zeitlich stabile Eigenschaft, andererseits als situationsabhängige Variable gesehen werden. Wir konnten zeigen, dass niedrige zeitlich stabile physiologische Erregung, die über die Ruhe-Herzrate gemessen wurde, riskantes Verhalten vorhersagte. Nach körperlichem Training war die physiologische Erregung der Versuchspersonen im Experiment kurzzeitig erhöht. Die Versuchspersonen tendierten dazu, nach diesem Training weniger riskant zu handeln. Zusammengenommen legen die Ergebnisse nahe, dass eine inverse Relation zwischen physiologischer Erregung und Risikoverhalten vorliegt. Die meisten Studien, die sich mit Risikoverhalten befassen, verwenden die sogenannte pay-one Auszahlungsmethode: In Risikospielen, die aus vielen Durchgängen bestehen, wird nur ein Durchgang des gesamten Risikospiels ausbezahlt. Wir untersuchten den Effekt der Auszahlungsmethode auf das Risikoverhalten, indem wir sowohl die pay-one Methode als auch die pay-all Methode, bei der die Gewinne aller Durchgänge ausbezahlt werden, in einem Zwischensubjekt-Design verwendeten. Wir fanden heraus, dass die Versuchspersonen in der pay-one Bedingung etwa 10% weniger riskant handelten, verglichen mit der pay-all Bedingung. Dieses Ergebnis legt nahe, dass die Risiko-Aversion in Paradigmen, die die pay-one Methode verwenden, überschätzt wird. Nachdem wir an einer schwierigen Aufgabe gearbeitet haben, sehnen wir uns nach einer angenehmeren Aufgabe. Diese Beobachtung führte zu einer generellen Unterscheidung von want-to und have-to Aufgaben. Unser Körper strebt nach einem Gleichgewicht zwischen diesen beiden Aufgabentypen im Sinne einer Homöostase. Wir erfassten ereigniskorrelierte Potentiale (ERPs) durch das Elektroencephalogramm in einem Risikospiel, das wir als want-to Aufgabe verwendeten. Wenn Versuchspersonen vorher eine schwere Aufgabe bearbeitet hatten, waren die Amplituden der ERP- Komponenten im Risikospiel erhöht im Vergleich zu einer Bedingung, in der die Versuchspersonen vorher eine einfache Aufgabe bearbeitet hatten. Wir schlussfolgern, dass die Motivationsänderung nach einer have-to Aufgabe in Richtung einer want-to Aufgabe mit Hilfe von ERP Amplituden erfasst werden kann. Zusammenfassend wurde gezeigt, dass physiologische Erregung, Framing und Motivation wichtige psychologische Variablen sind, die Risikoverhalten beeinflussen. Die spezifischen Wirkungsweisen dieser Einflüsse wurden untersucht und diskutiert. KW - Risikoverhalten KW - Motivation KW - arousal KW - framing KW - risk behavior Y1 - 2014 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-107149 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Madan, Christopher R. A1 - Bayer, Janine A1 - Gamer, Matthias A1 - Lonsdorf, Tina B. A1 - Sommer, Tobias T1 - Visual Complexity and Affect: Ratings Reflect More Than Meets the Eye JF - Frontiers in Psychology N2 - Pictorial stimuli can vary on many dimensions, several aspects of which are captured by the term ‘visual complexity.’ Visual complexity can be described as, “a picture of a few objects, colors, or structures would be less complex than a very colorful picture of many objects that is composed of several components.” Prior studies have reported a relationship between affect and visual complexity, where complex pictures are rated as more pleasant and arousing. However, a relationship in the opposite direction, an effect of affect on visual complexity, is also possible; emotional arousal and valence are known to influence selective attention and visual processing. In a series of experiments, we found that ratings of visual complexity correlated with affective ratings, and independently also with computational measures of visual complexity. These computational measures did not correlate with affect, suggesting that complexity ratings are separately related to distinct factors. We investigated the relationship between affect and ratings of visual complexity, finding an ‘arousal-complexity bias’ to be a robust phenomenon. Moreover, we found this bias could be attenuated when explicitly indicated but did not correlate with inter-individual difference measures of affective processing, and was largely unrelated to cognitive and eyetracking measures. Taken together, the arousal-complexity bias seems to be caused by a relationship between arousal and visual processing as it has been described for the greater vividness of arousing pictures. The described arousal-complexity bias is also of relevance from an experimental perspective because visual complexity is often considered a variable to control for when using pictorial stimuli. KW - visual complexity KW - affect KW - arousal KW - valence KW - eyetracking KW - emotion Y1 - 2018 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-190015 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 8 IS - 2368 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gerdes, Antje B. M. A1 - Wieser, Matthias J. A1 - Mühlberger, Andreas A1 - Weyers, Peter A1 - Alpers, Georg W. A1 - Plichta, Michael M. A1 - Breuer, Felix A1 - Pauli, Paul T1 - Brain activations to emotional pictures are differentially associated with valence and arousal ratings N2 - Several studies have investigated the neural responses triggered by emotional pictures, but the specificity of the involved structures such as the amygdala or the ventral striatum is still under debate. Furthermore, only few studies examined the association of stimuli’s valence and arousal and the underlying brain responses. Therefore, we investigated brain responses with functional magnetic resonance imaging of 17 healthy participants to pleasant and unpleasant affective pictures and afterwards assessed ratings of valence and arousal. As expected, unpleasant pictures strongly activated the right and left amygdala, the right hippocampus, and the medial occipital lobe, whereas pleasant pictures elicited significant activations in left occipital regions, and in parts of the medial temporal lobe. The direct comparison of unpleasant and pleasant pictures, which were comparable in arousal clearly indicated stronger amygdala activation in response to the unpleasant pictures. Most important, correlational analyses revealed on the one hand that the arousal of unpleasant pictures was significantly associated with activations in the right amygdala and the left caudate body. On the other hand, valence of pleasant pictures was significantly correlated with activations in the right caudate head, extending to the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These findings support the notion that the amygdala is primarily involved in processing of unpleasant stimuli, particularly to more arousing unpleasant stimuli. Reward-related structures like the caudate and NAcc primarily respond to pleasant stimuli, the stronger the more positive the valence of these stimuli is. KW - Psychologie KW - emotional pictures KW - amygdala KW - caudate KW - valence KW - arousal Y1 - 2010 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-68153 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Citron, Francesca M. M. A1 - Abugaber, David A1 - Herbert, Cornelia T1 - Approach and Withdrawal Tendencies during Written Word Processing: Effects of Task, Emotional Valence, and Emotional Arousal JF - frontiers in Psychology N2 - The affective dimensions of emotional valence and emotional arousal affect processing of verbal and pictorial stimuli. Traditional emotional theories assume a linear relationship between these dimensions, with valence determining the direction of a behavior (approach vs. withdrawal) and arousal its intensity or strength. In contrast, according to the valence-arousal conflict theory, both dimensions are interactively related: positive valence and low arousal (PL) are associated with an implicit tendency to approach a stimulus, whereas negative valence and high arousal (NH) are associated with withdrawal. Hence, positive, high-arousal (PH) and negative, low-arousal (NL) stimuli elicit conflicting action tendencies. By extending previous research that used several tasks and methods, the present study investigated whether and how emotional valence and arousal affect subjective approach vs. withdrawal tendencies toward emotional words during two novel tasks. In Study 1, participants had to decide whether they would approach or withdraw from concepts expressed by written words. In Studies 2 and 3 participants had to respond to each word by pressing one of two keys labeled with an arrow pointing upward or downward. Across experiments, positive and negative words, high or low in arousal, were presented. In Study 1 (explicit task), in line with the valence-arousal conflict theory, PH and NL words were responded to more slowly than PL and NH words. In addition, participants decided to approach positive words more often than negative words. In Studies 2 and 3, participants responded faster to positive than negative words, irrespective of their level of arousal. Furthermore, positive words were significantly more often associated with “up” responses than negative words, thus supporting the existence of implicit associations between stimulus valence and response coding (positive is up and negative is down). Hence, in contexts in which participants' spontaneous responses are based on implicit associations between stimulus valence and response, there is no influence of arousal. In line with the valence-arousal conflict theory, arousal seems to affect participants' approach-withdrawal tendencies only when such tendencies are made explicit by the task, and a minimal degree of processing depth is required. KW - approach KW - withdrawal KW - valence KW - arousal KW - emotion KW - words KW - polarity effects Y1 - 2016 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-165318 VL - 6 IS - 1935 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Cheetham, Marcus A1 - Wu, Lingdan A1 - Pauli, Paul A1 - Jancke, Lutz T1 - Arousal, valence, and the uncanny valley: psychophysiological and self-report findings JF - Frontiers in Psychology N2 - The main prediction of the Uncanny Valley Hypothesis (UVH) is that observation of humanlike characters that are difficult to distinguish from the human counterpart will evoke a state of negative affect. Well-established electrophysiological [late positive potential (LPP) and facial electromyography (EMG)] and self-report [Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM)] indices of valence and arousal, i.e., the primary orthogonal dimensions of affective experience, were used to test this prediction by examining affective experience in response to categorically ambiguous compared with unambiguous avatar and human faces (N = 30). LPP and EMG provided direct psychophysiological indices of affective state during passive observation and the SAM provided self-reported indices of affective state during explicit cognitive evaluation of static facial stimuli. The faces were drawn from well-controlled morph continua representing the UVH' dimension of human likeness (DHL). The results provide no support for the notion that category ambiguity along the DHL is specifically associated with enhanced experience of negative affect. On the contrary, the LPP and SAM-based measures of arousal and valence indicated a general increase in negative affective state (i.e., enhanced arousal and negative valence) with greater morph distance from the human end of the DHL. A second sample (N = 30) produced the same finding, using an ad hoc self-rating scale of feelings of familiarity, i.e., an oft-used measure of affective experience along the UVH' familiarity dimension. In conclusion, this multi-method approach using well-validated psychophysiological and self-rating indices of arousal and valence rejects for passive observation and for explicit affective evaluation of static faces the main prediction of the UVH. KW - emotional facial expressions KW - event-related potentials KW - electromyographic activity KW - startle reflex KW - arousal KW - unpleasant pictures KW - brain potentials KW - mere exposure KW - circumplex model KW - face recognition KW - neural response KW - valence KW - uncanny valley hypothesis KW - familiarity KW - EMG KW - EEG KW - LPP Y1 - 2015 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-151519 VL - 6 IS - 981 ER -