Affective Perception: The Power Is in the Picture

Viewing photographic images that depict affectively engaging events prompts a wide variety of psychophysiological and biological reactions that vary as a function of differences in rated pleasure, arousal and specific scene content. In this chapter, we review these data, and conduct new picture-based reliability analyses (using existing databases) with the goal of assessing the extent to which specific pictures reliably engage emotional reactions across individuals. Permutation analyses randomly selected subgroups of individuals and computed the correlation between mean emotional reactivity scores across scenes, resulting in a distribution of correlations for each measure indexing scene reliability. Emotional reactivity scores are compared for different scene contents, and the proportion of exemplars in each content category assessed for strong emotional engagement. For all measures, the data suggest that individual pictures are highly reliable in engaging emotional reactions, and that the specific content that engages the most emotional reactivity varies with measure. These preliminary analyses encourage future investigations aimed at constructing normative biological image databases that, in addition to evaluative reports, provide estimates of emotional reactions in body and brain for use in studies of emotion and emotional dysfunction.