Listening to Your Heart

TLDR

Controversial theories posit that bodily feedback shapes cognition, but a key prediction—that interoception ability modulates the strength of the body‑cognition link—remains untested. The studies show that accurate heartbeat perception amplifies the link between heart‑rate changes and arousal ratings, and that interoception can either aid or impair intuitive decisions depending on the valence of anticipatory signals, underscoring the pivotal role of bodily response generation and perception in emotion and intuition and supporting bodily‑feedback theories.

Abstract

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.”