Anxiety symptomatology and subjective-cardiac responding to a suspenseful movie clip

Abstract

There are known associations between the presence of experimentally-presented threats and peripheral physiological responses, such as a heart rate, which holds implications for understanding pathological levels of anxiety. Moving away from traditional task-based paradigms, we investigated whether subjective experience (i.e., continuous state anxiety ratings) and heart rate were associated with individual variations (n=133) in trait anxiety symptomatology (items on the hospital anxiety and depression scale) during an anxiogenic movie clip. In other words, do different trait anxiety-related processes manifest in altered anxiety states vs heart rate during movies? Using intersubject representational similarity analysis, we report a significant association between pairwise similarities in trait anxiety symptom profiles and state anxiety dynamics during suspenseful movie-watching. On the other hand, we failed to detect associations between trait anxiety symptoms and heart rate. We encourage future work to investigate the association between anxiety symptoms and heart rate in more anxiogenic movie stimuli, as well as incorporating multiple physiological recordings.