Heart Rate Variability (HRV) of Male Subjects Related to Oral Reports of Affective Pictures

This study is a replicate study with male subjects of our previous experiment with 25 female subjects. We measured HRV in 14 males while they were viewing 16 unpleasant, 16 neutral, and 16 pleasant International Affective Picture System (IAPS) PowerPoint slides. Spectral analysis was performed on the data using the fast Fourier transform to extract powers of the spectral components relating to sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. The preliminary results show that in the rep orting phase sympathetic activity is significantly lower (p<.05) during unpleasant pictures than during pleasant pictures. The results of male data show that unpleasant pictures produce a much lower sympathetic response in the evaluating and in the reporti ng phase than in the viewing phase. In the reporting phase, indication of lower sympathetic activity was found during unpleasant pictures t han during pleasant pictures.