Increasingly, a dynamic relationship is recognized between internal physiological state and cognition, in which changes in bodily arousal affect decision making and memory ( Bechara et al., 2000 Garfinkel et al., 2013).īrain areas implicated in the generation and representation of bodily arousal also support emotional and attentional processes. Signals from the body, including movement of facial muscles, can feedback to bias emotional judgments ( Strack et al., 1988). Emotional feelings are proposed to arise from the occurrence of physiological change and appraisal of its generating context ( James, 1890/1950 Lange, 1885 Schachter and Singer, 1962 Seth, 2013). “Peripheral” theories of emotion emphasize the centrality of bodily responses to subjective experience of emotion. However, the specific neural mechanisms have yet to be elucidated. The internal state of the body influences our perceptions, cognitions, and emotions. These novel findings highlight a major channel by which short-term interoceptive fluctuations enhance perceptual and evaluative processes specifically related to the processing of fear and threat and counter the view that baroreceptor afferent signaling is always inhibitory to sensory perception. Correspondingly, amygdala responses were greater to fearful faces presented at systole relative to diastole. Our results show that fearful faces were detected more easily and were rated as more intense at systole than at diastole. Participants performed behavioral and neuroimaging tasks to determine whether these interoceptive signals influence the detection of emotional stimuli at the threshold of conscious awareness and alter judgments of emotionality of fearful and neutral faces. Emotional and neutral faces were presented to human volunteers at cardiac systole, when ejection of blood from the heart causes arterial baroreceptors to signal centrally the strength and timing of each heartbeat, and at diastole, the period between heartbeats when baroreceptors are quiescent. Here, we investigated whether the processing of brief fear stimuli is selectively gated by their timing in relation to individual heartbeats. Cognitions and emotions can be influenced by bodily physiology.
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