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

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.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00114-9.

Keywords: Affective realism; Continuous flash suppression; Heartbeat detection task; Interoceptive sensitivity; Person perception.

Fig. 1

Trial structure for the Person Perception Task. Figure created with Biorender.com

Fig. 2

Cardiac interoceptive sensitivity (log-transformed HBD sensitivity) significantly moderated the strength of affective realism effects. Predicted means for all three suppressed affect conditions are plotted at the mean cardiac interoceptive sensitivity and ±1 standard deviation. Error bars show standard errors