R. E. Thayer (1989) proposed 2 types of activation: energetic arousal (awake-tired) and tense arousal (tense-calm). This view has been challenged by claims that energetic arousal and tense arousal are mixtures of valence and a single activation dimension. The authors present a direct test of this hypothesis by computing the correlation between the residuals of energetic arousal and tense arousa...

Lexical decisions to high- and low-arousal negative words and to low-arousal neutral and positive words were examined in an event-related potentials (ERP) study. Reaction times to positive and high-arousal negative words were shorter than those to neutral (low-arousal) words, whereas those to low-arousal negative words were longer. A similar pattern was observed in an early time window of the E...

Planning and readiness for action are associated with pre-movement brain activity reflected in the readiness potential (RP). Previous research suggests that RP is affected by higher-order cognitive functions. The present study investigated the relationship between arousal and RP. Twenty participants performed a RP paradigm in which they executed self-paced movements approximately every 4-5s. Pa...

Arousal is fundamental to many behaviors, but whether it is unitary or whether there are different types of behavior-specific arousal has not been clear. In Drosophila, dopamine promotes sleep-wake arousal. However, there is conflicting evidence regarding its influence on environmentally stimulated arousal. Here we show that loss-of-function mutations in the D1 dopamine receptor DopR enhance re...

We investigated the interplay between arousal and valence in the early processing of affective words. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read words organized in an orthogonal design with the factors valence (positive, negative, neutral) and arousal (low, medium, high) in a lexical decision task. We observed faster reaction times for words of positive valence and fo...