Valentini, E and Nicolardi, V and Aglioti, SM (2017) 'Visual reminders of death enhance nociceptive–related cortical responses and event-related alpha desynchronisation.' Biological Psychology. ISSN 0301-0511

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Abstract

Previous research suggests that prompting individuals to think on their own mortality affects their perception of painful somatic stimuli and related brain activity. Grounded on the assumption that reminders of mortality may recruit threat-defence mechanisms similar to the ones activated by painful nociceptive stimuli, we hypothesize that the effects exerted by linguistic reminders of death on pain perception and brain activity would be elicited by passive observation of death-related pictures vs. more generic threat-related pictures. Results showed an increase of the laser evoked P2 amplitude and oscillatory theta activity when participants observed death-related images. However, no change in pain ratings was found. Moreover, observation of death-related content was linked to increased oscillatory alpha desynchronisation but not to variations of visual evoked potentials amplitude. Our findings indicate that pairing potentially noxious stimuli with death-related images exerts a preferential modulation of nociceptive and visual cortical representations.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Alpha EEG Laser evoked potentials Reminders of mortality Terror management theory Theta Visual evoked potentials
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Divisions:	Faculty of Science and Health > Psychology, Department of
Depositing User:	Elements
Date Deposited:	11 Sep 2017 10:03
Last Modified:	30 Aug 2018 01:00
URI:	http://repository.essex.ac.uk/id/eprint/20348

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