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Skin Conductance Measures in Neuroeconomic Research

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Abstract

Skin conductance responses (SCR) are an established component of the psychological methods toolkit, and increasingly popular in neuroeconomics. This chapter discusses how SCR are generated by the sympathetic nervous system, the underlying central processes, and provides practical guidelines for SCR research. These guidelines are based on the existing methodological literature and recommendations by the Society for Psychophysiological Research. Analysis strategies for SCR are presented in the light of contemporary, model-based approaches that yield optimal statistical power to make inference on central states. The chapter then gives an overview over applications of SCR in neuroeconomics and outlines current research directions. Because emotional, cognitive, and motor processes can all elicit SCR, interpretation in economic experiments is sometimes challenging. It is therefore recommended to experimentally control possible cognitive and motor confounds. Finally, it would be useful to complement SCR with other peripheral measures of sympathetic/parasympathetic activity, in particular heart period and pupil size.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Further measures of tonic arousal include the tonic skin conductance level (SCL) and area under the curve (AUC) which I will not discuss in this chapter—interested readers are referred to (Bach et al. 2010c; Boucsein 2012).

  2. 2.

    The fact that SCR indices can dissociate from heart rate might indicate that there is no global sympathetic arousal (Boucsein 2012); but the heart rate is under control of the parasympathetic system as well.

  3. 3.

    This is different from the infrequently used methods of endosomatic recording, which measures the skin potential response (SPR) without applying an external voltage, and from exosomatic measurements with alternating voltage, measuring alternating current (AC). A further method, not recommended by the SPR, is to use constant current, measuring voltage.

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Acknowledgments

The author thanks Deborah Talmi, Joel Winston, Michael Gaebler, Lyudmyla Kovalenko, and Matthias Staib, for helpful comments on a first draft of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Dominik R. Bach

  2. University College London, London, UK

    Dominik R. Bach

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Correspondence to Dominik R. Bach .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Differentielle and Biologische Psychologie, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms- Universität Bonn, Bonn, Germany

    Martin Reuter

  2. Department of Molecular Psychology, Institute for Psychology and Education, Ulm University, Ulm, Germany and Key Laboratory for NeuroInformation, School of Life Science and Technology, Center for Information in Medicine, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China

    Christian Montag

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Bach, D.R. (2016). Skin Conductance Measures in Neuroeconomic Research. In: Reuter, M., Montag, C. (eds) Neuroeconomics. Studies in Neuroscience, Psychology and Behavioral Economics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35923-1_18

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