Assessment of emotional valence of the neutral pictures: it depends on the category / 中华行为医学与脑科学杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To explore which category of pictures could induce neutral emotion better for male and female respectively,and investigate the effects of inducing neutral emotion with eight categories of neutral pictures,including the nature,plants,animals,humans,culture,death-waste,food and computer graphics.Methods Using selected stimuli from the simple version (revised by Huang and Luo(2004)) of the International Affective Picture System (IAPS),the rating of calm-mood degree were collected for 135 neutral pictures based on 186 undergraduate students (78 male and 108 female).Results The pictures in the categories of plants(6.87 ±1.53),nature(7.00 ± 1.73) and culture(6.93 ± 1.37) induced neutral emotion significantly better than human (5.89 ± 1.49),computer graphics (5.94 ± 1.93) and food (5.87 ± 2.03) (P ＜ 0.05) which were better than animals (5.03 ± 1.70) and death-waste (4.71 ± 1.94) (P ＜ 0.05).In addition,gender difference was found in rating calm-mood degree for death-waste,people and animals categories.For these categories males showed higher rating for the calm-mood degree than females (P＜ 0.05),while for the other categories,there was no gender difference.Conclusion The ideal categories of neutral pictures that inducing neutral emotion are plants,nature and culture.This study provide empirical evidences for selecting and using pictures to induce relative calm mood in the emotional study,and the contribution of this study to the clinical research is discussed.