Background: The search for autonomic correlates of emotional processing has been a matter of interest for the scientific community with the goal of identifying the physiological basis of emotion. Despite an extensive state-of-the-art exploring the correlates of emotion, there is no absolute consensus regarding how the body processes an affective state.Objectives: In this work, we aimed to aggregate the literature of psychophysiological studies in the context of emotional induction. Methods: For this purpose, we conducted a systematic review of the literature and a meta-analytic investigation, comparing different measures from the electrodermal, cardiovascular, respiratory and facial systems across emotional categories/dimensions. Two-hundred and ninety-one studies met the inclusion criteria and were quantitatively pooled in random-effects meta-analytic modelling. Results: Heart rate and skin conductance level were the most reported psychophysiological measures. Overall, there was a negligible differentiation between emotional categories with respect to the pooled estimates. Of note, considerable amount of between-studies’ heterogeneity was found in the meta-analytic aggregation. Self-reported ratings of emotional arousal were found to be associated with specific autonomic-nervous system (ANS) indices, particularly with the variation of the skin conductance level. Conclusions: Despite this clear association, there is still a considerable amount of unexplained variability that raises the need for more fine-grained analysis to be implemented in future research in this field.
