Focusing on your heart: The enhancing effect of interoception on emotion recognition
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1
Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney, Australia
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2
School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Australia
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3
Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA), Australia
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4
University of New South Wales, Australia
Aims: Interoception is the awareness of one’s own physiological state (e.g., via cardiac cues). Better interoceptive abilities have been associated with enhanced emotional capacity. However, to date how brief periods of interoception directly influence emotion recognition has not been investigated. Moreover, recent evidence suggests declines in both interoceptive ability and emotion recognition with increasing age. Here, we investigated whether emotion recognition is influenced by interoception in younger and older adults.
Methods: Forty healthy volunteers (23 younger: aged 21-35; 17 older: aged 55-75) completed two within-subject interoception conditions, where participants pressed a button each time they: 1) detected their heartbeat (Cardiac condition) or 2) heard a recorded heartbeat (Control condition). ECG was simultaneously recorded and an accuracy index was calculated for each condition. Immediately after, participants completed an emotion recognition task, where emotional faces were displayed for 3 seconds and participants selected a corresponding emotional label.
Results: Interoceptive accuracy was significantly different between groups (p = .03), with older adults showing worse cardiac accuracy than younger adults (p = .02), but comparable accuracy on the control condition (p = .54). Interestingly, both groups showed improved emotion recognition following the cardiac than the control condition (p < .001), despite older adults showing lower emotion recognition than younger adults overall (p = .03). Surprisingly, correlational analyses revealed no significant relationship between objective interoceptive accuracy and the enhancement of emotion recognition performance in either group (both p > .05).
Conclusions: This study reveals enhancement of emotion recognition immediately following a cardiac interoception task in younger and older adults, suggesting that brief periods of focus on one’s own heartbeat may foster improvements in emotion recognition, irrespective of objective accuracy of the task. Future research is needed to further understand the mechanisms of this effect, whether other dimensions of interoception (e.g., respiration) are similarly effective.
Keywords:
interoception,
Ageing,
social cognition,
Heart Rate,
emotion recognition
Conference:
ASP2017: 27th Annual Meeting for the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology, Parramatta, Australia, 29 Nov - 1 Dec, 2017.
Presentation Type:
Oral Presentation
Topic:
Abstract (General)
Citation:
Hazelton
JL,
Hudson
A and
Kumfor
F
(2019). Focusing on your heart: The enhancing effect of interoception on emotion recognition.
Conference Abstract:
ASP2017: 27th Annual Meeting for the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2017.224.00019
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Received:
13 Oct 2017;
Published Online:
25 Jan 2019.
*
Correspondence:
Ms. Jessica L Hazelton, Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2050, Australia, jessica.hazelton@sydney.edu.au