Understanding Visceral Influences on Behaviour: Physiological and Psychological Mechanisms

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The idea that the mind and the body are intimately linked has been a pervasive theme within psychology and the neurosciences. Brought to the forefront by William James in the 19th century, who emphasized the role of bodily sensations in emotional experience, interest in body-mind relationships has been re-kindled by recent advances in cognitive neuroscience that have revealed how bodily information is represented in the brain. These new insights have attracted attention not just among researchers interested in emotion, but from cognitive psychologists as well, and promise to shed new light on the interplay between emotion and cognition. In broad terms, my research program is centered on understanding how the synergistic relationship between emotion and cognition is shaped by feedback from our bodies, and aims to characterize the nature of the behavioural and experiential outcomes that arise from brain-body interactions. The research described in this proposal represents a step toward this over-arching goal, by seeking to understand the psychological and physiological factors that dictate how and when bodily feedback shapes behaviour. More concretely, the proposed research will build on previously established links between cardiovascular feedback and emotion perception, as well as my recent work pointing to an important role for such feedback in recognition memory judgments. I aim to: i) examine whether the behavioural influence of cardiovascular feedback depends on how this information is appraised, ii) examine whether variation in pertinent aspects of cardiovascular functioning alters the behavioural influence of this feedback, iii) examine how neural representations of cardiovascular feedback are related to its influence on behaviour. These three short-term research questions will be addressed in three separate, but related projects. ***In Project 1, we will utilize experimental manipulations designed to alter how cardiovascular feedback is appraised, with the goal of probing whether its behavioural influence depends on how this information is interpreted. In Project 2, we will use measures of cardiovascular functioning, focusing on blood pressure, to evaluate how variability among pertinent cardiovascular parameters is related to the behavioural influence of cardiovascular feedback. Finally, in Project 3, we will measure brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG) to examine whether the influence of such feedback depends on the magnitude of cortical signals thought to reflect cardiovascular signalling. Together, these research projects promise to provide insight into the mechanism(s) by which information from the body can shape behaviour, and will further our understanding of how our thoughts and feelings are informed by body-mind interactions.