Back
The heart contracts to reward: monetary incentives and preejection period.
Journal article

The heart contracts to reward: monetary incentives and preejection period.

  • Richter M Section of Psychology, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland. Michael.Richter@unige.ch
  • Gendolla GH
  • 2009-02-20
Published in:
  • Psychophysiology. - 2009
Adult
Blood Pressure
Electrocardiography
Female
Heart
Heart Rate
Humans
Male
Motivation
Psychomotor Performance
Receptors, Adrenergic, beta
Reward
Young Adult
English Wright's (1996) integration of motivational intensity theory (Brehm & Self, 1989) and Obrist's (1981) active coping approach predict that cardiovascular reactivity in active coping depends on the importance of success when task difficulty is unclear. Despite the support for this perspective, one of the basic hypotheses-the mediation of these effects by beta-adrenergic activity-has not been tested yet. To close this gap, participants worked on a delayed-matching-to-sample task and could earn either 1, 15, or 30 Swiss Francs for a successful performance. Results showed that preejection period reactivity-an indicator of beta-adrenergic impact on the heart-increased with increasing incentive value. Thus, this experiment closes a gap in the support of Wright's model by demonstrating that beta-adrenergic reactivity is associated with incentive value under conditions of unclear difficulty.
Language
  • English
Open access status
closed
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/147408
Statistics
Document views: 25 File downloads: