Understanding Visceral Influences on Behaviour: Physiological and Psychological Mechanisms

心理和身体紧密相连的观点一直是心理学和神经科学中一个普遍存在的主题。19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，他将这一观点带入了前沿，最近认知神经科学的进展揭示了身体信息在大脑中的表现方式，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线索。总而言之，我的研究计划集中在了解情绪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，目的是描述大脑-身体相互作用产生的行为和经验结果的性质。这项提案中描述的研究通过试图了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，代表了朝着这一总体目标迈出的一步。更具体地说，这项拟议的研究将建立在之前建立的心血管反馈和情绪感知之间的联系的基础上，以及我最近的工作，指出这种反馈在识别记忆判断中扮演着重要角色。我的目标是：i)研究心血管反馈的行为影响是否取决于这些信息是如何被评估的，ii)研究心血管功能的相关方面的变化是否改变了这种反馈的行为影响，iii)研究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解决。在项目1中，我们将利用旨在改变心血管反馈如何被评估的实验操作，目的是探索其行为影响是否取决于如何解释这些信息。在项目2中，我们将使用心血管功能测量，重点是血压，以评估相关心血管参数之间的变异性如何与心血管反馈的行为影响相关。最后，在项目3中，我们将使用脑电(EEG)测量大脑活动，以检查这种反馈的影响是否取决于被认为反映心血管信号的皮质信号的大小。总之，这些研究项目有望提供对来自身体的信息塑造行为的机制(S)的洞察，并将进一步了解我们的思想和感受是如何通过身体和精神的相互作用而获得信息的。

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.