Psychophysiological Correlates of Electrodermal Lability

ABSTRACT This study of 75 college student subjects investigated the psychophysiological correlates of electrodermal lability. Resting‐stabile and resting‐labile subjects were defined as those who were respectively below and above the median of all same‐sex subjects in frequency of nonspecific skin conductance responses during rest, whereas stimulus‐stabile and stimulus‐labile subjects were those respectively below and above the median in trials to habituation of the skin conductance orienting response. These two classification systems were found to be highly correlated with one another, but not entirely equivalent. With both lability measures, labiles had higher resting skin conductance levels than stabiles and also exhibited larger skin conductance orienting responses to both signal and nonsignal tones. Labiles produced orienting responses with shorter latencies, rise times, and half recovery‐times. Resting‐labiles also differed from resting‐stabiles in the components of the triphasic heart rate response to the tones, having larger decelerative responses. The data are consistent with the view that labiles are better able than stabiles to allocate attentional capacity to environmental events and to respond to changing demands in an attentional situation.