Fear-related psychophysiological patterns are situation and person dependent: A Bayesian model comparison approach

Is there a universal mapping of physiology to emotion, or do these mappings vary substantially by person or situation? Psychologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists have debated this question for decades. Most previous studies have focused on differentiating emotions on the basis of accompanying autonomic responses using analytical approaches that often assume within-category homogeneity. In the present study, we took an alternative approach to this question. We determined the extent to which the relationship between subjective experience and autonomic reactivity generalizes across or depends upon the individual and situation for instances of a single emotion category, specifically, fear. Electrodermal activity and cardiac activity - two autonomic measures that are often assumed to show robust relationships with instances of fear - were recorded while participants reported fear experience in response to dozens of fear-evoking videos related to three distinct situations: spiders, heights, and social encounters. We formally translated assumptions from diverse theoretical models into a common framework for model comparison analyses. Results exceedingly favored a model that assumed situation-dependency in the relationship between fear experience and autonomic reactivity, with subject variance also significant, but constrained by situation. Models that assumed generalization only across situations or individuals performed much worse by comparison. These results call into question the assumption of generalizability of autonomic-subjective mappings across instances of fear, such as in translational research from non-human animals to humans, and suggest the benefits of adopting a situated approach to understanding the autonomic correlates of fear experience.