Investigating emotion in psychiatry with the International Affective Picture System

LETTER TO THE EDITORS

Investigating emotion in psychiatry with the International Affective Picture System

Rafaela Larsen Ribeiro^I; Sabine Pompéia^II; Orlando Francisco Amodeo Bueno^III

^IVisiting associate professor, Department of Psychobiology, Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP), São Paulo, SP, Brazil

^IIAffiliate Professor, Department of Psychobiology, UNIFESP, São Paulo, SP, Brazil

^IIIProfessor, Department of Psychobiology, UNIFESP, São Paulo, SP, Brazil

^{Correspondence}

Dear editors,

We would like to stress how important the investigation of emotion in psychiatry has been through a study published by our group in this journal.¹ This study aimed at determining Brazilian norms for subjective affective assessment of the photographs included in the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) following the methodology used in the original study.² Such photographs can be used for the study of emotional responses in normal subjects and for the diagnosis and assessment of emotional disorders in Brazilian clinical populations.

The IAPS, designed to be used in studies worldwide as a standardized emotional material, comprehends hundreds of high-resolution colored pictures which represent several aspects of the daily life (sports, fashion, landscapes, pornography, violence, etc.). They act as powerful producers of emotions, which can be easily presented in the laboratory, thus allowing precise experimental control of factors such as exposure time.³

Among the main psychiatric conditions in which the IAPS has been recently used to investigate emotion we can cite anxious patients,⁴ psychopaths,⁵ depressive patients,^6,7 drug dependents⁸ and schizophrenics.⁹ Schizophrenic patients,⁹ for example, have shown higher emotional response to positive pictures, whereas drug dependents in abstinence periods⁸ have shown lower emotional response to these pictures, compared with the normal population.

Therefore, controlled studies to investigate reactions to emotional contents by psychiatric patients may lead to a better determination of psychiatric conditions, besides possibly helping in the selection of more specific treatments for each type of patient. They may also allow assessment of changes resulting from pharmacological and/or therapeutic treatments.

REFERENCES

1. Ribeiro RL, Pompéia S, Bueno OFA. Normas brasileiras para o International Affective Picture System (IAPS): comunicação breve. Rev Psiquiatr Rio Gd Sul. 2004;26(2):190-4.

2. Lang PJ, Bradley MM, Cuthbert BN. International affective picture system (IAPS): instruction manual and affective ratings. Technical Report A-4. The Center for Research in Psychophysiology. Gainesville: University of Florida; 1999.

3. Bradley MM, Lang PJ. Measuring emotion: behavior, feeling and physiology. In: Lane R & Nadel L, eds. Cognitive neuroscience of emotion. New York: Oxford University Press; 2000. p. 242-76.

4. Aftans LI, Pavlov SV, Reva NV, Varlamov AA. Event-related synchronization and desynchronization of EEG during appraisal of threatening and pleasant visual stimuli in high anxious subjects. Zh Vyssh Nerv Deiat Im I P Pavlova. 2004;54(4):473-81.

5. Weber T, Sommer M, Hajak G, Muller J. Emotional processing in patients with a dissocial personality disorder subtype "psychopathy" according to PCL-R. Psychiatr Prax. 2004;31 Suppl 1:S68-9.

6. Wagner V, Muller JL, Sommer M, Klein HE, Hajak G. Changes in the emotional processing in depressive patients: a study with functional magnetoresonance tomography under the employment of pictures with affective contents. Psychiatr Prax. 2004;31 Suppl 1:S70-2.

7. Pause BM, Raack N, Sojka B, Goder R, Aldenhoff JB, Ferstl R. Convergent and divergent effects of odors and emotions in depression. Psychophysiology. 2003;40(2):209-25.

8. Aguilar de Arcos F, Verdejo-Garcia A, Peralta-Ramirez MI, Sanchez-Barrera M, Perez-Garcia M. Experience of emotions in substance abusers exposed to images containing neutral, positive, and negative affective stimuli. Drug Alcohol Depend. 2005;78(2):159-67.

9. Hempel RJ, Tulen JH, van Beveren NJ, van Steenis HG, Mulder PG, Hengeveld MW. Physiological responsivity to emotional pictures in schizophrenia. J Psychiatr Res. 2005;39(5):509-18.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  16 Nov 2006
• Date of issue
  Aug 2006