Reviving a forgotten dimension—potency in affective neuroscience

Abstract

The present chapter first provides a review of established theoretical accounts and neuroscientific studies on the processing of emotional stimuli that focus on two dimensions of emotion: valence and arousal. A third dimension, namely potency (or control), had been introduced already in the early work by Osgood and co-workers but ignored in most of current theoretical and empirical work in affective neuroscience. Results of a re-analysis of event-related potential (ERP) data from lexical decision tasks on emotional and neutral German words indicate the potency dimension to play a major role in the elicitation of two distinguishable ERP components that have been previously related to emotional arousal and valence, respectively. Implications for future studies in this field of research are discussed.