RESEARCH ARTICLE
Children’s Heart Rate and Vicariously Aroused Affect in Response to Others’ Differing Emotional Experiences
Xenia Anastassiou-Hadjicharalambous1, 2, *, David Warden1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2008Volume: 1
First Page: 78
Last Page: 83
Publisher ID: TOPSYJ-1-78
DOI: 10.2174/1874350100801010078
Article History:
Received Date: 08/10/2007Revision Received Date: 19/09/2008
Acceptance Date: 07/10/2008
Electronic publication date: 29/10/2008
Collection year: 2008
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
This study examined vicariously induced Heart Rate (HR) patterns in response to others’ sadness, fear, anger and happiness, in children (N = 44, 22 girls and 22 boys, aged 7 to 10), when confronted with a brief emotion evocative film consisting of a series of evocative episodes each of which was of at least moderate intensity. HR was consistently higher relative to baseline in response to others’ fear (p < .001), sadness (p < .011), anger (p < .014) and the positive emotion of happiness/surprise (p < .002). These findings suggest that HR can reliably be used as a marker of vicariously aroused affect in response to a range of different emotions in children, given that stimulus intensity is at least moderate.