Bottle Shape Elicits Gender-Specific Emotion A Startle Reflex Modulation Study英文文献资料.docVIP

Psychology 2012. Vol.3, No.7, 548-554 Published Online July 2012 in SciRes (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/psych) /10.4236/psych.2012.37081 Bottle Shape Elicits Gender-Specific Emotion: A Startle Reflex Modulation Study Arvina Grahl , Ursula Greiner , Peter Walla 1 1 1,2,3* Biological Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria 1 2 School of Psychology, Faculty of Science and Information Technology, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, Australia 3 Applied Neuroscience, Neuroconsult, Vienna, Austria * Email: arvina.grahl@univie.ac.at, peter.walla@.au Received March 1 , 2012; revised April 6 , 2012; accepted May 11 , 2012 st th th Abstract: Does a bottle elicit a gender-specific emotion response that varies as a function of its shape? The answer to this question is of basic interest as well as of specific interest to the industry. We intro- duced startle reflex modulation to objectively measure emotion-related aspects of different bottles. This approach was chosen to complete behavioural data with objective physiological data. Three bot- tles differing only in shape were used as test stimuli. It is well known that the magnitude of an eye blink as a response to acoustic startle stimulation reflects current emotion elicited by a foreground stimulus. Reduced eye blink amplitudes reflect positive emotion, whereas enhanced eye blink ampli- tudes reflect negative emotion. No significant main effect of bottle shape on eye blink amplitudes was found, but a significant gender effect occurred for one specific bottle shape. Presentation of a me- dium-sized, polygonal bottle was associated with significantly larger eye blink amplitudes in male par- ticipants comp