Autonomic reactions to mutilation pictures: Positive affect facilitates safety signal processing

Forsurvival, humans arecontinuouslyvigilant forsignsofdanger. Equally important,but lessstudied,isourability to detectandrespondtosafety cues. Thetraitofpositiveaffectmay beakey componentdetermininghumanvariabilityin safety detection. Here we investigate autonomic and self-report reactivity to pictures of mutilated bodies, after reading a text about the art of mimicking injuries in the movies. Participants that scored high in positive affect trait showed attenuated autonomic reactions to the mutilation pictures. Thus, high positive affect facilitated engagement in safety cues and modulated reflexive reactions of the brain’s defense system. Descriptors: Emotion, Heart rate, Electrodermal, Affective pictures, Positive affect, Safety Contemporarytheoriesofemotionarebasedonthebeliefthat,in order to survive, animals, including humans, are continuously evaluating the presence or absence of risk in the environment, identifying signals of danger or security. The interaction between riskandsafetyfactors, internalandexternaltotheindividual,isa balance that results in adaptive behavior.