Figure 3.
Effects of emotional context on subjective stimulus intensity. A, Significant emotional modulation of perceived intensity was only observed for painful stimuli (black squares), but not for innocuous stimuli (white circles) whose perception remained stable despite changing the emotional context. Note also that only unpleasant pictures modulated pain, whereas pleasant pictures did not change significantly the perception of stimuli relative to neutral images. B, ANOVA interaction plot shows that the subjective pain ratings were significantly different between pleasant and unpleasant conditions containing explicit references to human body sensations (body). Differences were not significant between pleasant and unpleasant pictures not depicting body sensations (nonbody). Moreover, pain scores were significantly higher during the unpleasant-body than the unpleasant-nonbody condition. Values are expressed as mean ± SE (**p < 0.01; *p < 0.05). Values for neutral pictures were never significant and are not illustrated for graph clarity.