From appraisal and attention to affective experience : genetic, social and exercise-based influences on emotional evaluation and psychophysiological reactions

Experiencing an affective, emotional state upon encountering novel stimuli is dependent on the nature of the stimulus as well as the appraisal of the stimulus by the perceiving individual. Contemporary views on stimulus processing consider appraisal to be the underlying mechanism determining the subjective affective outcome, as it is experienced by the individual. This thesis had the objective of contributing to the understanding of appraisal processes in healthy participants, with a special focus on self- versus other-reference of the experienced stimuli. To this extent, the experimental His-Mine paradigm (Herbert, DFG HE5880/3-1) has been repeatedly employed, assessing the emotional evaluation of positive, negative, and neutral words, combined with self- or other-reference. In the first study, associations between genetic markers (OXTR polymorphisms rs53576 and rs2268498) and emotional evaluation have been investigated, demonstrating a possible relationship in the form of an interpretation bias in the appraisal of neutral words, i.e., ambiguous stimuli devoid of valence information (Meixner, Montag, & Herbert, 2019). While the usually found self-positivity bias did not interact with participants’ genotype, rs53576-A+/rs2268498-C+ carriers displayed a less positive, and more negative interpretation bias in the appraisal of neutral stimuli, depending on self- or other-reference of the stimuli. In the second study, romantic relationships have been examined as a possible factor changing the appraisal of self- and other-related emotional information, even in the absence of explicit partner-related instructions. It could be shown that the self-positivity bias persisted in a romantic relationship. However, participants in a romantic relationship evaluated positive, other-related stimuli more often in a valence-congruent fashion, and therefore akin to positive, self-related stimuli (Meixner & Herbert, 2018). In the third study, the influence of acute aerobic exercise with varying attentional focus on the ...