Parasympathetic Cardiac Control and Depressive Symptoms Predict Positive and Ambivalent Affective Evaluations in a Nonclinical Sample

ABSTRACT Evaluative processes facilitate motivated responses to a wide range of stimuli in the environment, allowing individuals to make adaptive decisions in response to potential threats and rewards. These evaluations are influenced by many perceptual and biological factors. Recent perspectives have highlighted a need for more research examining how these individual factors interact to shape variability in evaluative processes. The present work examined how two such factors, resting parasympathetic activity and depressive symptoms, relate to affective evaluations of images in a nonclinical sample. Measures of depressive symptoms and resting parasympathetic activity were collected from a sample of young adults. Participants also rated positive, negative, and emotional arousal ratings to pleasant, neutral, unpleasant, and disgust pictures. Results showed that higher depressive symptoms were associated with increased positivity ratings of pleasant and neutral pictures, increased negativity ratings of pleasant, neutral, and disgust pictures, and ambivalence (high ratings of both positivity and negativity) of pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant pictures. Lower parasympathetic activity at rest was related to increased positivity ratings of pleasant and neutral pictures, increased negativity ratings of neutral pictures, increased ambivalence of neutral pictures, and increased emotional arousal ratings of pleasant pictures. This work suggests depressive symptoms and resting parasympathetic activity have complex effects across dimensions of evaluative processes. It points to a need for more research examining how these factors influence both positive and negative evaluations in both clinical and nonclinical populations.