Lichtenstein-Vidne L, Gabay S, Cohen N, Henik A
a Department of Psychology, Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience , Ben-Gurion University of the Negev , Beer-Sheva , Israel.
b Department of Psychology, Institute of Information Processing and Decision Making (IIPDM) , University of Haifa , Haifa , Israel.
Cogn Emot. 2017 Jun;31(4):699-711. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2016.1164668. Epub 2016 Apr 7.
The way our brain processes emotional stimuli has been studied intensively. One of the main issues still under debate is the laterality of valence processing. Herein, we employed the fact that pupil size increases under conditions of higher mental effort and during emotional processing, in order to contrast three proposed hypotheses in the field. We used different manual response mapping for emotional stimuli: Participants responded with their right hand for positive and with their left hand for negative facial expressions, or vice versa. The hands position was either regular (Experiment 1) or crossed (Experiment 2) in order to rule out a "spatial-valence association" alternate explanation. A third experiment was conducted by employing a passive viewing procedure of peripheral emotional stimuli. In the first two experiments, pupil size was larger when participants responded to positive stimuli with their left hand and to negative with their right hand, compared with the opposite mapping. Results of Experiment 3 strengthen the findings of Experiments 1 and 2. These findings provide significant psychophysiological evidence for the valence hypothesis: Processing positive stimuli involves the left hemisphere, while processing negative stimuli involves the right hemisphere. These results are discussed in relation to contemporary theories of emotion processing.
我们大脑处理情绪刺激的方式已得到深入研究。仍在争论的主要问题之一是效价加工的偏侧性。在此，我们利用在更高心理努力条件下以及情绪加工过程中瞳孔大小会增加这一事实，来对比该领域提出的三种假设。我们对情绪刺激使用了不同的手动反应映射：参与者对正面面部表情用右手做出反应，对负面面部表情用左手做出反应，反之亦然。手部位置要么是正常的（实验1），要么是交叉的（实验2），以排除“空间 - 效价关联”这一替代解释。第三个实验通过采用对周边情绪刺激的被动观看程序进行。在前两个实验中，与相反的映射相比，当参与者用左手对正面刺激做出反应并用右手对负面刺激做出反应时，瞳孔尺寸更大。实验3的结果强化了实验1和2的发现。这些发现为效价假设提供了重要的心理生理学证据：处理正面刺激涉及左半球，而处理负面刺激涉及右半球。我们结合当代情绪加工理论对这些结果进行了讨论。
