• DOI:10.1177/0956797610389191
• Corpus ID: 9696806

Listening to Your Heart

@article{Dunn2010ListeningTY,
  title={Listening to Your Heart},
  author={Barnaby D. Dunn and Hannah C Galton and Ruth M. Morgan and Davy Evans and Clare Oliver and Marcel Meyer and Rhodri Cusack and Andrew D. Lawrence and T. Dalgleish},
  journal={Psychological Science},
  year={2010},
  volume={21},
  pages={1835 - 1844}
}

• B. Dunn, Hannah C Galton, +6 authors T. Dalgleish
• Published 24 November 2010
• Psychology
• Psychological Science

Theories proposing that how one thinks and feels is influenced by feedback from the body remain controversial. A central but untested prediction of many of these proposals is that how well individuals can perceive subtle bodily changes (interoception) determines the strength of the relationship between bodily reactions and cognitive-affective processing. In Study 1, we demonstrated that the more accurately participants could track their heartbeat, the stronger the observed link between their heart rate reactions and their subjective arousal (but not valence) ratings of emotional images. In Study 2, we found that increasing interoception ability either helped or hindered adaptive intuitive decision making, depending on whether the anticipatory bodily signals generated favored advantageous or disadvantageous choices. These findings identify both the generation and the perception of bodily responses as pivotal sources of variability in emotion experience and intuition, and offer strong supporting evidence for bodily feedback theories, suggesting that cognitive-affective processing does in significant part relate to “following the heart.”