Orienting response pattern as predicting psychological arousal

The present study attempts to extend previous research showing differences in orienting response (OR) elicitation to innocuous stimuli between patients with various psychophysiological disorders and healthy controls. This research seeks to determine whether healthy subjects could be similarly differenciated. Moreover, this report analyze differences in the physiological response to other, active and passive coping tasks, according to the individual differences in the OR elicitation. A variety of physiological measures was recorded from 20 female subjects in response to 12 sounds, 4 reaction time trials (active coping task) and pressure pain (passive coping). Results show that the OR pattern can be used to differenciate among subjects without psychophysiological disorder, though this capacity is limited to tasks that do not require any response (automatic tasks). It is suggested that the OR pattern may be a basic mechanism that can facilitate the development of psychophysiological disorders.