Increased heart rate after exercise facilitates the processing of fearful but not disgusted faces

Pezzulo, Giovanni; Iodice, Pierpaolo; Barca, Laura; Chaussé, Pierre; Monceau, Sophie; Mermillod, Martial

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-18761-5

Cited by 43 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 102 publications

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“…A previous study that manipulated participants' physiological feedback during exercise reported that emotional intensity and salience of neutral faces was enhanced by false feedback of increased HR (50). Other studies have reported that providing feedback on HR influences the perceived attractiveness of stimuli (51), and that increasing HR by exercise sensitizes to fearful stimuli (52). Our present study and the aforementioned studies show that providing false physiological feedback is an effective method for probing interoceptive processing and producing interoceptive illusions.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 68%

An interoceptive illusion of effort induced by false heart-rate feedback

Iodice¹,

Porciello

Bufalari

et al. 2019

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Interoception, or the sense of the internal state of the body, is key to the adaptive regulation of our physiological needs. Recent theories contextualize interception within a predictive coding framework, according to which the brain both estimates and controls homeostatic and physiological variables, such as hunger, thirst, and effort levels, by orchestrating sensory, proprioceptive, and interoceptive signals from inside the body. This framework suggests that providing false interoceptive feedback may induce misperceptions of physiological variables, or “interoceptive illusions.” Here we ask whether it is possible to produce an illusory perception of effort by giving participants false acoustic feedback about their heart-rate frequency during an effortful cycling task. We found that participants reported higher levels of perceived effort when their heart-rate feedback was faster compared with when they cycled at the same level of intensity with a veridical feedback. However, participants did not report lower effort when their heart-rate feedback was slower, which is reassuring, given that failing to notice one’s own effort is dangerous in ecologically valid conditions. Our results demonstrate that false cardiac feedback can produce interoceptive illusions. Furthermore, our results pave the way for novel experimental manipulations that use illusions to study interoceptive processing.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 68%

An interoceptive illusion of effort induced by false heart-rate feedback

Iodice¹,

Porciello

Bufalari

et al. 2019

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…In a second step, a mean vector of all participants was computed via vector addition of individual means divided by their number, showing the average self-paced picture onset in the cardiac cycle across the group, and weighted by its length (mean resultant length ϱ) to reflect the spread of individual means around the circle. As a measure of concentration of circular data, ϱ was integrated in a subsequent Rayleigh test for uniformity (Pewsey, Neuhäuser, & Ruxton, 2013): if ϱ gets sufficiently high to exceed a threshold value (i.e., the set of individual means is not spread evenly across the cardiac cycle), the data can be interpreted as too locally clustered to be consistent with a uniform distribution that served as null hypothesis (Pewsey et al, 2013). The code for individual and group-level circular analysis can be found on GitHub (https://github.com/SKunzendorf/0303_INCASI).…”

Section: Circular Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Active information sampling varies across the cardiac cycle

et al. 2019

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Perception and cognition oscillate with fluctuating bodily states. For example, visual processing has been shown to change with alternating cardiac phases. Here, we study the heartbeat's role for active information sampling-testing whether humans implicitly act upon their environment so that relevant signals appear during preferred cardiac phases. During the encoding period of a visual memory experiment, participants clicked through a set of emotional pictures to memorize them for a later recognition test. By self-paced key press, they actively prompted the onset of short (100 ms) presented pictures. Simultaneously recorded electrocardiograms allowed us to analyze the self-initiated picture onsets relative to the heartbeat. We find that self-initiated picture onsets vary across the cardiac cycle, showing an increase during cardiac systole, while memory performance was not affected by the heartbeat. We conclude that active information sampling integrates heart-related signals, thereby extending previous findings on the association between body-brain interactions and behavior. K E Y W O R D Scardiovascular, emotion, interoception, memory, sensation/perception, young adults 2 of 16 | KUNZENDORF Et al. Cardiac activity occurs in a cycle of two phases: During diastole, the ventricles relax to be filled with blood; during systole, the ventricles contract and eject blood into the arteries, while visceral pathways send information about each heartbeat to the brain (Critchley & Harrison, 2013). Such natural phasic changes of the cardiovascular state have been mainly associated with variations in perception. For sensory processing, which is typically measured with detection tasks or reaction time tasks, response to passively presented stimuli has been shown to be attenuated during early cardiac phases (i.e., during systole) or relatively enhanced at later time points in the cardiac cycle (i.e., at diastole;

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“…Evidence for the influential role the body's physiological condition has on emotional, perceptual processing was found in a study that manipulated (increased) heart rate before participants performed a gender-categorization task with (male and female) faces expressing an emotion congruent with the interoception of an increased heart rate (fear), an incongruent emotion (disgust), or neutrality (Pezzulo et al, 2018). Participants performed the task in two conditions: in a rest condition, when they had remained at rest to maintain their baseline heart rate; and in an exercise condition, when they had performed physical exercise to build and sustain an increased heart rate.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bodily Information and Top-Down Affective Priming Jointly Affect the Processing of Fearful Faces

Yu¹,

Iodice²,

Pezzulo³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Embodied theories of emotion posit that the processing of emotional stimuli re-enacts exteroceptive, interoceptive, and prior affective states congruent with the emotion. Activating an exteroceptive, interoceptive, or prior affective state congruent with a particular emotion should consequently anticipate perception of that emotion. Previous research found that an increased heart rate facilitates the processing of faces expressing the emotion that interoception is congruent with (fear), in comparison to those expressing an incongruent emotion (disgust) or neutrality. Here, we investigate whether the (top-down) prior affective context in which the emotion simulation is situated also interacts with (bottom-up) interoceptive heart rate manipulation to facilitate emotional processing of exteroceptive stimuli. Participants categorized faces with happy, fearful, and neutral expressions after their interoceptive state (heart rate: increased or normal) and contextual affective state (primes: positive, negative, and neutral) were manipulated. We hypothesized that increased heart rate would facilitate the processing of fearful and happy faces, specifically for congruent affective priming, i.e. negative or positive, respectively. We found that: a) negative affective primes facilitated the processing of fearful faces, over and above the facilitating effect of increased heart rate reported in previous research, and b) no effect of either top-down or bottom-up factors, nor their interaction, in the domain of positive emotions. It remains to be established whether this asymmetry depends on the specificity of negative emotions, the quality of our manipulations, or other factors.

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Increased heart rate after exercise facilitates the processing of fearful but not disgusted faces

Cited by 43 publications

References 102 publications

An interoceptive illusion of effort induced by false heart-rate feedback

An interoceptive illusion of effort induced by false heart-rate feedback

Active information sampling varies across the cardiac cycle

Bodily Information and Top-Down Affective Priming Jointly Affect the Processing of Fearful Faces

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