This study assessed the effects of imagery valence and arousal on the visually prompted startle reflex, heart rate, and estimates of probe occurrence in 24 males and 22 females. Valence and arousal independently augmented startle magnitudes, similar to prior research with acoustic probes (Witvliet, C.V.O., Vrana, S.R., 1995. Psychophysiological responses as indices of affective dimensions, Psyc...

Eye blink startle magnitude is assumed to be higher in threatening contexts. A scarce amount of studies suggest that this does not hold true when startle is measured during perceived threats to homeostatic integrity. The present study was set up to describe the startle response pattern to a selection of interoceptive stimuli. Female subjects (N=36) were exposed once to 90 s of continued (1) col...

Postural and eye-blink reactions to acoustic startle probes were examined in 24 volunteers, who completed two blocked conditions (baseline, startle). A postural reaction during the startle condition demonstrated a reflexive movement in the anterior-posterior direction, which was not observed during the baseline condition. This reflexive response was positively associated with the eye-blink refl...

AIMS We have found consistent and significant sex differences in recovery from the increased seizure susceptibility observed during ethanol withdrawal (EW) in our rat model system. The main objective of the present study was to determine if sex differences in EW generalized to an additional behavioral measure startle reactivity. METHODS Acoustic startle or seizure threshold responses were mea...

Salt-sensitive normotensive men exhibit an enhanced pressor response to mental stress. Although an enhanced pressor response is associated with higher affective startle modulation in men, an association between salt sensitivity of blood pressure and affective startle modulation has not been studied so far. We studied reactivity to mental stress and startle modulation in 14 salt-sensitive health...

Rise time and duration are two parametric characteristics of the eliciting stimulus frequently used to differentiate among psychophysiological reflexes. The present research varied the duration (study 1) and rise time (study 2) of an intense acoustic stimulus to dissociate cardiac defense and cardiac startle using the eyeblink response as the external criterion of startle. In each study, 100 pa...

Contest theory predicts the evolution of a stable mixture of different strategies for fighting. Here, we investigate the possibility that stable between-individual differences in startle-response durations influence fighting ability or 'resource-holding potential' (RHP) in the beadlet sea anemone, Actinia equina. Both winners and losers showed significant repeatability of pre-fight startle-resp...

1. An acoustic startle stimulus delivered in place of a 'go' signal in a voluntary reaction time (RT) task has been shown previously to advance the onset latency of a prepared distal limb movement without affecting the amplitude of the muscle response or movement kinematics. The primary goal of this study was to use muscles with a larger startle response to investigate whether the startling sti...

An emotion-modulated acoustic startle paradigm for inducing positive and negative affect was used to address pregoal and postgoal affect. Participants played a computerized lottery task in which they chose digits that could match a subsequently displayed, random set of numbers. In the positive conditions, matches led to monetary rewards. In the negative condition, matches led to an aversive noi...