Abstract
In the context of emotional states occurring during end-of-life processes, an understanding of emotional processing when facing stimuli associated with death would inform the study of whether these stimuli constitute a specific emotion schema whose adaptive value differs from the adaptive value of other negative and unpleasant stimuli. We investigated emotional processing when facing images of death and characterized this emotional processing according to the two-dimensional model of Peter Lang. For this purpose, a set of images of death was built and characterized along the dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance. The degree of suffering portrayed in each image was also categorized as high, medium, or low. We found that images of death cause an emotional response that differs from the response to other types of unpleasant images and that such processing depends on the degree of suffering portrayed in the image.
Keywords
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
