| Most researchers employing electrodermal measures distinguish between "attentional" and "emotional" skin conductance (SC) activity (e.g. Dawson, Schell & Filion, 1990; Boucsein, 1992). It is possible, however, that attentional and emotional SC are two sides of the same coin, and that what people refer to as "emotional" SC reflects attentional processes associated with emotion. At issue is whether the link between emotionality and SC is mediated by attention (in that emotional stimuli elicit attentional processes that produce SC), or whether there is a more purely emotional (non-attentional) component to SC.;Two studies examined this issue. The first was a meta-analytic review of all articles on the psychological meaning of SC activity published in Psychophysiology. Results indicated that researchers use the same parameters of SC activity to support both attentional and emotional hypotheses. Thus the existing literature is ambiguous regarding the interpretation of SC.;Study 2 was a controlled experiment testing the hypothesis that attentional processes are at the heart of both "attentional" and "emotional" SC activity. While performing a secondary reaction time (RT) task in which they needed to classify a visually-presented object as quickly as possible, participants were exposed to slides selected to be attention- but not emotion-eliciting, both attention- and emotion-eliciting, or neither attention- nor emotion-eliciting. Performance decrements on the ARTS task were used to index the attention-eliciting properties of the slides. Results indicated that SC differences across the slides could largely be accounted for by ARTS differences, thereby supporting the hypothesized link between attention and SC activity, and providing very little evidence of a separate emotional component to the SC signal.;Taken together, these two studies support the hypothesis that both "attentional" and "emotional" forms of SC activity are related to attentional processes. These results represent an important step toward a unified conceptualization of the psychological significance of SC activity that may increase the value of SC as an indicator of both emotional and attentional processes. Finally, these results illustrate the intimate relationship between cognition and emotion and highlight the need for caution in categorizing phenomena as "cognitive" or "emotional". |
