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ated with explicit responses that interfere with raw affective
processing. In other words, the valence of cognitively appraised
affective content can be different to the valence of the actual
underlying raw affective content itself. This idea fits well the
emotion-model as proposed by Walla and Panksepp (2012).
Alternatively, one might think that in the current study, eye
blink responses were more reflective of motivation-related
aspects of affective content than valence-related aspects. After
all, the effect of mere self-reference on startle responses did not
depend on condition of emotion. In the pleasant as well as the
unpleasant emotion condition, self-reference resulted in en-
hanced eye blink amplitudes. It may be assumed that motiva-
tional aspects are more pronounced in cases of self-reference
regardless of valence. In fact, it has been reported that SRM
provided an insight into not only the emotional responses to-
ward images, but also motivation related aspects related to im-
ages (Lang et al., 1998; Gard et al., 2007; Grillon & Baas,
2003). In contrast, some authors tended to focus more heavily
on the emotional aspects that SRM is able to measure. This
study revisits the findings of previous literature and supports
the use of SRM as not only a measure of emotion but also a
measure of motivation. This seems reasonable assuming that
self-reference is directly correlated with motivation. The more
an individual’s self is linked with pleasant or unpleasant input
the higher the motivation to become active.
Finally though, it must be emphasised that SRM still pre-
sented the expected valence-related difference between pleasant
and unpleasant images. Regardless of whether self-referenced
or not, pleasant images revealed reduced eye blink responses
and negative images resulted in larger eye blink amplitudes. In
sum, this study provides evidence that SRM is indeed sensitive
to both affective valence and self-reference. Finally, we con-
clude that the present study supports the idea that the various
methods that are used to investigate emotion-related processing
are differently sensitive to different aspects of emotion-related
processing. Due to its objective nature (independent from self
report) it is believed that SRM will be used in various further
applied fields in the future (see Koller & Walla, 2012; Arthur-
Kelly et al., 2012).
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