Emotions can alter kinesthetic acuity
Résumé
Kinesthesia allows us to perceive our own body movements and relies on the integration of proprioceptive information arising from muscle spindles. We recently showed that that emotion can alter the proprioceptive messages from such muscle afferents, making them more sensitive to muscle lengthening when participants were listening sad music. Presently, we investigated whether these changes in proprioceptive feedback relating to emotional state may affect the perception of limb movements. Kinesthetic acuity was tested in 20 healthy, young adults by imposing very slow movements that consisted of either plantar flexion or dorsiflexion of the ankle, or no movement. Different emotional states were induced by listening to neutral, sad, or happy music, or they performed the task without music. The participants had to relax and focus on the music (or nothing), and then they had to shift their focus to the direction of an incoming movement. After each movement (or no movement), they were asked its direction. Muscle activity, heart rate, and electrodermal activity were recorded during each trial, and after each music condition the participants rated the emotion felt on a visual analog scale. We showed that kinesthetic acuity was increased during the sad condition, as compared to the no music or neutral conditions. Furthermore, the rating of the emotional content of the music corroborated with changes in physiological measures. We concluded that emotion can shape our perception of movements, since feeling sadness significantly increases our kinesthetic acuity. Functionally, this may be relevant for the preparation of appropriate behavioral responses.
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