Skip to main content
Log in

Affect and Social Judgment: The Roles of Physiological Reactivity and Interoceptive Sensitivity

  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
  • Published:
Affective Science Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Humans imbue the objects of their perception with affective meaning, a phenomenon called affective realism. The affective realism hypothesis proposes that a brain continually predicts the meaning of sensations (e.g., identifying a sound as a siren, or a visual array as a face) in part by representing the current state of the body and the immediate physiological impact that similar sensory events have entailed in the past. However, the precise contribution of physiological activity to experiences of affective realism remains unknown. In the present study, participants’ peripheral physiological activity was recorded while they made social evaluative judgments of target faces displaying neutral expressions. Target faces were shown concurrent with affective images that were suppressed from reportable awareness using continuous flash suppression. Results revealed evidence of affective realism—participants judged target faces more positively when paired with suppressed positive stimuli than suppressed negative stimuli—but this effect was significantly less pronounced among individuals higher in cardiac interoceptive sensitivity. Moreover, while some modest differences in peripheral physiological activity were observed across suppressed affective stimulus conditions, physiological reactivity to affective stimuli did not directly predict social evaluative judgments. We explore the implications of these findings with respect to both theories of emotion and theories detailing a role for interoception in experiences of first-person subjectivity.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. At the time this study was run, language was used that conflated assigned sex at birth and gender. For example, participants might have selected from options, “man” and “woman.” Future studies should be careful not to perpetuate this type of mislabeling.

References

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

All authors helped develop the research idea. J.B.W., E.S., L.F.B., and K.S.Q. developed the experimental design and collected the data. M.J.F. and J.B.W analyzed the data. M.J.F wrote the article with input from co-authors.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mallory J. Feldman.

Ethics declarations

Funding Information

This research was supported in part by grants from the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (W5J9CQ-12-C-0049 to L.F.B. and W911N-16-1-0191 to K.S.Q. and J.B.W). The views, opinions, and/or findings contained in this paper are those of the authors and shall not be construed as an official Department of the Army position, policy, or decision, unless so designated by other documents.

Data Availability

Data are available at https://osf.io/c4yph/.

Ethical Approval

This study was approved by the Northeastern University Institutional Review Board and was performed in accordance with the ethical standards as laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare no competing interests.

Consent to Participate

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Consent for Publication

Not applicable.

Additional information

Handling Editor: Tristen Inagaki

Supplementary Information

ESM 1

(DOCX 36 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Feldman, M.J., Siegel, E., Barrett, L.F. et al. Affect and Social Judgment: The Roles of Physiological Reactivity and Interoceptive Sensitivity. Affec Sci 3, 464–479 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-022-00114-9

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-022-00114-9

Keywords

Navigation