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On the relationship between interoceptive awareness, emotional experience, and brain processes
Olga Pollatos1, Wladimir Kirsch, Rainer Schandry
1Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilans-University of Munich, Leopoldstr. 13, 80802 Munich, Germany. pollatos@psy.uni-muenchen.de
Brain Research. Cognitive Brain Research
|November 22, 2005
Summary
Individuals with better interoceptive awareness, specifically heartbeat perception, experience emotions as more arousing. This heightened perception correlates with distinct brain activity patterns when processing emotional stimuli.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Psychology
- Psychophysiology
Background:
- Interoceptive awareness, the perception of internal bodily signals, is theorized to influence emotional processing.
- The relationship between interoceptive accuracy and brain responses to emotional stimuli remains an active area of research.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the link between interoceptive awareness, specifically heartbeat perception accuracy, and electroencephalography (EEG) measures of emotion-related brain activity.
- To explore how individual differences in heartbeat perception influence the cortical processing of emotional and neutral visual stimuli.
Main Methods:
- 44 participants completed a heartbeat perception task and were categorized as good or poor perceivers.
- Participants viewed 60 International Affective Picture System (IAPS) images (pleasant, unpleasant, neutral) while EEG and EOG were recorded.
- Subjective ratings of emotional valence and arousal were collected after each stimulus presentation.
Main Results:
- Good heartbeat perceivers rated emotional stimuli as significantly more arousing than poor perceivers.
- Significant differences in visually evoked potentials were observed between good and poor perceivers, particularly in P300 and slow-wave latency ranges.
- Higher P300 amplitudes and positive correlations between heartbeat perception scores and arousal ratings/P300 amplitudes were found in good perceivers.
Conclusions:
- Interoceptive accuracy, as measured by heartbeat perception, is strongly associated with the cortical processing of emotional stimuli.
- These findings support theories, such as the James-Lange theory, that posit a role for visceral feedback in emotional experience.
- Individual differences in sensing internal bodily signals impact how the brain processes emotionally salient information.