All studies used different acoustic stimuli, e.g. personally relevant stimuli with strong arousal capacity such as the subject's own name, or less arousing stimuli like classical music or pure tones.
The affective modulation in the Non-PTSD sample could represent a higher behavioural importance of more arousing threatening stimuli compared to less arousing pleasant stimuli.
The food, however, as a non-social but arousing stimulus, did not affect the dogs' behaviour.
When individuals are initially exposed to an emotionally arousing stimulus, they typically have a strong physiological response to it.
A competing hypothesis (arousal competition hypothesis) suggests that arousing stimuli should lead to increased disinhibition through competition for executive resources.
The labial thermistor discriminated sexual from nonsexual arousing stimuli and was sensitive to different levels of sexual arousal.
Second, it is an open issue whether emotionally arousing stimuli result in even stronger effects or whether physical arousal affects emotional and neutral stimuli equally.
The labial thermistor adequately discriminates between generally arousing and sexually arousing stimuli, increasing its utility as a measure for between-subject study designs.
Corden, B., Chilvers, R. & Skuse, D. Avoidance of emotionally arousing stimuli predicts social-perceptual impairment in Asperger's syndrome.
In this light, when humans are exposed to negatively arousing stimuli, the aversive system becomes activated, leading the body and mind to allocate more cognitive resources to encode information about the negative stimuli.
The processing of unconsciously perceived stimuli is particularly important for visually salient or arousing stimuli.
