Autonomic Nervous System Activity During Positive Emotions: A Meta-Analytic Review

Autonomic nervous system activity distinguishes among emotions.

Emotion-specific activity in the autonomic nervous system was generated by constructing facial prototypes of emotion muscle by muscle and by reliving past emotional experiences. The autonomic activity produced distinguished not only between positive and negative emotions, but also among negative emotions. This finding challenges emotion theories that have proposed autonomic activity to be undif...

Feeling good: autonomic nervous system responding in five positive emotions.

Although dozens of studies have examined the autonomic nervous system (ANS) aspects of negative emotions, less is known about ANS responding in positive emotion. An evolutionary framework was used to define five positive emotions in terms of fitness-enhancing function, and to guide hypotheses regarding autonomic responding. In a repeated measures design, participants viewed sets of visual image...

Autonomic Nervous System Differences among Emotions

Following decades of controversy and uncertainty, there is now sufficient empirical basis for asserting the existence of a limited set of autonomic differences among emotions. Findings of autonomic distinctions among emotions derived from the work of the author and his colleagues using two methods of emotion elicitation are reviewed. For five of these autonomic distinctions, convergent findings...

Autonomic nervous system activity in emotion: a review.

Autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity is viewed as a major component of the emotion response in many recent theories of emotion. Positions on the degree of specificity of ANS activation in emotion, however, greatly diverge, ranging from undifferentiated arousal, over acknowledgment of strong response idiosyncrasies, to highly specific predictions of autonomic response patterns for certain emo...

Measuring autonomic nervous system activity