Abstract
Emotional sensations and inferring another’s emotional states have been suggested to depend on predictive models of the causes of bodily sensations, so-called interoceptive inferences. In this framework, higher sensibility for interoceptive changes (IS) reflects higher precision of interoceptive signals. The present study examined the link between IS and emotion recognition, testing whether individuals with higher IS recognize others’ emotions more easily and are more sensitive to learn from biased probabilities of emotional expressions. We recorded skin conductance responses (SCRs) from forty-six healthy volunteers performing a speeded-response task, which required them to indicate whether a neutral facial expression dynamically turned into a happy or fearful expression. Moreover, varying probabilities of emotional expressions by their block-wise base rate aimed to generate a bias for the more frequently encountered emotion. As a result, we found that individuals with higher IS showed lower thresholds for emotion recognition, reflected in decreased reaction times for emotional expressions especially of high intensity. Moreover, individuals with increased IS benefited more from a biased probability of an emotion, reflected in decreased reaction times for expected emotions. Lastly, weak evidence supporting a differential modulation of SCR by IS as a function of varying probabilities was found. Our results indicate that higher interoceptive sensibility facilitates the recognition of emotional changes and is accompanied by a more precise adaptation to emotion probabilities.
Highlights
Interoception, defined as the sense of the internal physiological state of the body [1], has gained growing interest in recent years because of its impact on physical and mental health, as well as on the processing of emotion
We found a significant main effect of valence, b = 0.03, β = 0.10, t = 5.75, p < 0.001, with increased reaction times (RTs) for fearful facial expressions, and a main effect of intensity, b = 0.02, β = 0.07, t = 3.49, p < 0.001, driven by increased RTs for low intensity of an expression
Post-hoc tests comparing a low (-25) and a high (25) level of the centred MAIA-score revealed that, participants with lower interoceptive sensibility (IS) showed increased RTs for high compared to low intensity of happy expressions, b = -0.06, t = -4.72, p < 0.001, and of fearful ones, b = -0.08, t = -6.59, p < 0.001
Summary
Interoception, defined as the sense of the internal physiological state of the body [1], has gained growing interest in recent years because of its impact on physical and mental health, as well as on the processing of emotion. The somatic marker hypothesis [5, 6] incorporated this view emphasizing viscerosensory origins of emotions [7] This notion has been developed further under the framework of predictive coding, which presumes that emotional experiences are determined by inferences of the causes of bodily sensations based on past. Mismatches between descending interoceptive predictions and primary interoceptive afferents convey information about interoceptive changes and activate autonomous responses to restore physiological homeostasis or allostasis [9, 11]. This interplay is flexibly tuned to the current reliability of exteroceptive and interoceptive signals by means of precision, regulating the relative weight accorded to prediction errors and predictions. Highly precise prediction errors relative to prediction gives bias to bottom-up processing, whereas highly precise predictions relative to prediction errors give bias to top-down processing [12, 13]
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