Conveners
Embodied emotion and motivation: interoception, physiology, and brain dynamics in affective experience
- Giada Lettieri
Understanding how emotions and motivational states emerge from the dynamic interplay between brain activity, physiological signals, and interoceptive processes is a central challenge in affective neuroscience. Integrating evidence from functional neuroimaging, psychophysiology, interoception, and virtual reality interventions, this symposium illustrates how central and peripheral physiological...
Background. Aberrant reward processing plays a central role in several psychiatric disorders. The Sign-Tracker/Goal-Tracker (ST/GT) model, developed in rodent research, distinguishes individuals who attribute incentive salience to reward-predictive cues (ST) from those who focus on the reward itself (GT). We translated this model to humans using functional MRI (fMRI) and investigated its...
Understanding how bodily signals contribute to the experience of complex emotions is central to models of embodied affective processing. Aesthetic chills -brief, intense physiological reactions often triggered by emotionally salient media- provide a unique window into peak affective states and their underlying bodily dynamics. While chills have been associated with both unipolar (positive or...
Gastrointestinal (GI) signals have long been hypothesized to contribute to emotional experiences. However, empirical evidence directly linking gastric activity to subjective emotional states remains sparse and inconsistent. In a recent study conducted in our laboratory, an ingestible capsule measuring pH, pressure, and temperature within the GI tract, was used, together with a single-channel...
This study explores two innovative, immersive virtual reality (VR) interventions aimed at improving psychological wellbeing in individuals with moderate to severe depressive symptoms. The first intervention integrates heart rate variability biofeedback (HRV-BF), a technique known to promote autonomic balance by enhancing parasympathetic activity and reducing sympathetic dominance. The second...
