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. 2017 Aug:93:220-223.
doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2017.02.010. Epub 2017 May 2.

From heart to mind: Linking interoception, emotion, and theory of mind

Punit Shah  1 , Caroline Catmur  2 , Geoffrey Bird  3
Affiliations

From heart to mind: Linking interoception, emotion, and theory of mind

Punit Shah et al. Cortex. 2017 Aug.
No abstract available

Keywords: Alexithymia; Cardiac perception; Emotion; Insula; Interoception; Mentalizing; Mindreading; Predictive coding; Theory of mind.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
The link between interoception, emotion, and theory of mind. (A) The Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC) was administered (Dziobek et al., 2006), in which participants watched a 15-min movie about a social interaction divided into short clips. After viewing each clip, they were presented with a multiple choice question requiring them to infer the mental state of one character. Only one of four answers was correct. Performance was quantified separately for emotional (e.g., “What is Sandra feeling?”) and non-emotional (e.g., “What is Michael thinking?”) questions. (B) Interoceptive accuracy was positively correlated with overall MASC score (rs = .31, P = .008, left panel), driven by a significant association between interoception and emotional items (rs = .41, P < .001, middle panel). However, there was no such association between interoception and the non-emotional items (rs = .03, P = .80, right panel) and the two correlations were significantly different (z = 2.38, P = .017).
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