Understanding Visceral Influences on Behaviour: Physiological and Psychological Mechanisms

心灵和身体密切相关的观点一直是心理学和神经科学中的一个普遍主题。世纪，威廉·詹姆斯（William James）强调了身体感觉在情感体验中的作用，他将这一观点带到了前沿。认知神经科学的最新进展揭示了身体信息是如何在大脑中表现的，这重新点燃了人们对身心关系的兴趣。这些新的见解不仅吸引了对情绪感兴趣的研究人员的注意，也吸引了认知心理学家的注意，并有望为情绪和认知之间的相互作用提供新的见解。从广义上讲，我的研究项目集中在理解情感和认知之间的协同关系是如何通过我们身体的反馈来塑造的，并旨在描述大脑与身体相互作用产生的行为和体验结果的性质。本提案中所描述的研究代表了朝着这一过度目标迈出的一步，通过寻求理解决定身体反馈如何以及何时塑造行为的心理和生理因素。更具体地说，拟议的研究将建立在先前建立的心血管反馈和情绪感知之间的联系，以及我最近的工作指出，这种反馈在识别记忆判断中的重要作用。我的目标是：i）检查心血管反馈的行为影响是否取决于如何评价该信息，ii）检查心血管功能的相关方面的变化是否改变该反馈的行为影响，iii）检查心血管反馈的神经表征如何与其对行为的影响相关。这三个短期研究问题将在三个独立但相关的项目中得到解决。

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.