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Fear from the heart: sensitivity to fear stimuli depends on individual heartbeats

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 17:35 authored by Sarah Garfinkel, Ludovico Minati, Marcus A Gray, Anil SethAnil Seth, Raymond Dolan, Hugo CritchleyHugo Critchley
Cognitions and emotions can be influenced by bodily physiology. Here, we investigated whether the processing of brief fear stimuli is selectively gated by their timing in relation to individual heartbeats. Emotional and neutral faces were presented to human volunteers at cardiac systole, when ejection of blood from the heart causes arterial baroreceptors to signal centrally the strength and timing of each heartbeat, and at diastole, the period between heartbeats when baroreceptors are quiescent. Participants performed behavioral and neuroimaging tasks to determine whether these interoceptive signals influence the detection of emotional stimuli at the threshold of conscious awareness and alter judgments of emotionality of fearful and neutral faces. Our results show that fearful faces were detected more easily and were rated as more intense at systole than at diastole. Correspondingly, amygdala responses were greater to fearful faces presented at systole relative to diastole. These novel findings highlight a major channel by which short-term interoceptive fluctuations enhance perceptual and evaluative processes specifically related to the processing of fear and threat and counter the view that baroreceptor afferent signaling is always inhibitory to sensory perception.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Published version

Journal

Journal of Neuroscience

ISSN

1529-2401

Publisher

Society for Neuroscience

Issue

19

Volume

34

Page range

6573-6582

Department affiliated with

  • Clinical and Experimental Medicine Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2014-06-10

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2014-06-10

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2014-06-10

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