The influence of cardiac synchronisation on self-attribution to external objects in male participants

TL;DR

This study explores how heartbeats might influence how people attribute emotions to objects, finding that accurate awareness of heartbeats affects this process.

Contribution

The study reveals that interoceptive accuracy modulates self-attribution to synchronized objects, even when synchronisation alone does not.

Findings

Cardiac synchronisation did not significantly affect emotion assignment to bodily or non-bodily targets.

Participants with high interoceptive accuracy attributed more emotional images to synchronized targets.

Interoceptive accuracy mediates attention to cardiac synchrony in self-attribution tasks.

Abstract

Interoception, the representation of our bodily state derived from physiological signals, is fundamental to our sense of self. Previous studies using cardiac feedback paradigms demonstrated interoceptive effects on self-perception. However, it remains unclear whether interoceptive information can extend self-attribution to non-bodily objects. This study aimed to elucidate whether cardiac signals can induce self-attribution to non-bodily objects and how interoceptive accuracy modulates this effect. A total of 44 male volunteers participated in an emotion assignment task where they viewed images of palms (bodily targets) and spheres (non-bodily targets) flashing in or out of sync with their heartbeat and assigned emotional images (positive/negative) to these targets. A heartbeat discrimination task was used to measure the interoceptive accuracy. The results showed no significant effect of synchronisation on emotion assignment for either the target type or the valence of the emotional images. However, participants with high interoceptive accuracy attributed both positive and negative images more to synchronised targets than those with low interoceptive accuracy. These findings suggest that although cardiac synchronisation may not uniformly facilitate the self-attribution of external objects, interoceptive accuracy may mediate attention to synchrony. Future studies should explore the conditions under which cardiac signals influence self-attribution.

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