Doing good or bad: How interactions between action and emotion expectations shape the sense of agency

Abstract

The emotional consequences of our own and others' actions can influence our agentive self-awareness in social contexts. Positive outcomes are usually linked to the self and used for self-enhancement, whereas negative outcomes are more often attributed to others. In most situations, these causal attribution tendencies seem to be immediately present instead of involving reflective interpretations of the action experience. To address the question at which level of the cognitive hierarchy emotions and action perception interact, we adopted a social reward anticipation paradigm. Here, participants or their interaction partner received positive or negative action outcomes and performed speeded attribution choices regarding causation of the action outcome. Event-Related Potential (ERP) results showed that the emotional value of an outcome already influenced the classical N1 self-attenuation effect, with reduced embodied agentive self-awareness for negative outcomes at initial sensorimotor stages. At the level of the N300, the degree of updating and affective evaluation associated with the respective attributive decision was reflected and particularly associated to attribution tendencies for positive events. Our results show an early interaction between emotion and agency processes, and suggest that self-serving cognition can be grounded in embodied knowledge from low-level sensorimotor mechanisms.

Cardiac interoceptive learning is modulated by emotional valence perceived from facial expressions

“…Our current dataset highlights an effect of emotional valence on this interoceptive learning process. Results hereby approximate findings in the exteroceptive domain (Batty and Taylor, 2003; Ishai et al , 2006) as well as studies reporting a modulating impact of valence on other internal, pre-reflective forms of bodily self-awareness such as agency (Gentsch et al , 2015; Yoshie and Haggard, 2017). …”

I just lost it! Fear and anger reduce the sense of agency: a study using intentional binding

“…Our result extends previous work in two important ways. First, our effect was found for action binding , while previous studies found valence effects primarily for outcome binding (Gentsch et al 2015 ; Takahata et al 2012 ; Yoshie and Haggard 2013 , 2017 ). Action binding is potentially a more informative measure of action-outcome association than outcome binding: it is independent of the physical characteristics of the outcome event, while outcome binding is not (Wolpe and Rowe 2014 ).…”

“…In principle, scientific data on both the objective controllability of action under emotion and the subjective experience of agency should be highly relevant to this question, but, in practice, current law has not been informed by the evidence base of cognitive or brain sciences. Previous studies reported reduced sense of agency over actions that produced negative, compared to either positive or neutral, outcomes (Barlas et al 2018 ; Christensen et al 2016 ; Gentsch et al 2015 ; Yoshie and Haggard 2017 ). One might suggest, therefore, that negative emotions might cause a reduction in the sense of control over one’s own actions and their external outcomes.…”

“…Thus, one might predict that induction of a negative emotional state such as fear or anger would reduce the sense of control over one’s actions. Indeed, several studies have shown that negative action outcomes, such as fearful or angry human vocalisations produced by voluntary key presses, reduce sense of agency over the committed action (Barlas et al 2018 ; Christensen et al 2016 ; Gentsch et al 2015 ; Takahata et al 2012 ; Yoshie and Haggard 2013 , 2017 ; but see; Moreton et al 2017 , for contrary findings). Other studies have demonstrated that positive emotion inductions enhances sense of agency (Aarts et al 2012 ), and alters awareness of the intention to act (Rigoni et al 2015 ).…”

Representational precision in visual cortex reveals outcome encoding and reward modulation during action preparation

“…Using a p < .01 threshold, we found that area-specific representational precision was associated with lower scores on the Behavioral Inhibition Scale, r(28) = 0.482, p = 0.007 (cf. Gentsch et al, 2015). However this result did not survive Bonferroni or FDR correction, and is therefore not discussed further.…”