Dirupo Giada, Corradi-Dell'Acqua Corrado, Kashef Maha, Debbané Martin, Badoud Deborah
Theory of Pain Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences (FPSE), University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland; Geneva Neuroscience Center, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland; Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Theory of Pain Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences (FPSE), University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland; Geneva Neuroscience Center, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Cortex. 2020 Sep;130:16-31. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2020.05.010. Epub 2020 May 30.
Embodied models of social cognition argue that others' emotional states are processed by re-enacting a representation of the same state in the observer, along with associated somatic and physiological responses. In this framework, previous studies tested whether a strong sensitivity to interoceptive signals (i.e., inputs arising from within one's body) facilitates the understanding of others' affect, leading to mixed results. Such heterogeneity in the literature could reflect methodological differences in paradigms employed, with some probing classification of a precise condition, and others requiring the assessment of supra-ordinal dimensions orthogonal to many states. Here, we engaged fifty young women in a study where they evaluated others' naturalistic facial reactions to painful and disgusting stimuli of comparable unpleasantness. Separately, we measured their interoceptive abilities through a well-known heartbeat counting task. We found that individuals that were more accurate in tracking their heartbeats across time were also more prone to judge facial expressions as more unpleasant (supra-ordinal assessment). However, when specifically asked to discriminate between comparably-unpleasant pain and disgust (state-specific assessment), participants' performance was not influenced by their interoceptive abilities. Although confined to a female sample, this study extends our knowledge on the role of interoception in the understanding of others, which influences only the evaluation of general features such as unpleasantness (common between pain and disgust), without extending to the appraisal of a precise state. This finding supports multi-componential models of social cognition, suggesting that only part of our ability to assess others' affect is mediated by a representation of one's affective/somatic responses.
社会认知的具身模型认为，他人的情绪状态是通过在观察者身上重新模拟相同状态的表征以及相关的躯体和生理反应来进行处理的。在此框架下，先前的研究测试了对本体感受信号（即来自身体内部的输入）的强烈敏感性是否有助于理解他人的情感，结果不一。文献中的这种异质性可能反映了所采用范式的方法差异，一些研究探究精确条件的分类，而另一些则要求评估与多种状态正交的超序维度。在这里，我们让50名年轻女性参与一项研究，她们评估他人对具有相当不愉快程度的疼痛和厌恶刺激的自然面部反应。另外，我们通过一项著名的心跳计数任务测量了她们的本体感受能力。我们发现，在一段时间内更准确追踪自己心跳的个体也更倾向于将面部表情判断为更不愉快（超序评估）。然而，当被特别要求区分相当不愉快的疼痛和厌恶（特定状态评估）时，参与者的表现不受其本体感受能力的影响。尽管该研究仅限于女性样本，但它扩展了我们对本体感受在理解他人中的作用的认识，即本体感受仅影响对诸如不愉快程度（疼痛和厌恶共有的）等一般特征的评估，而不扩展到对精确状态的评估。这一发现支持了社会认知的多成分模型，表明我们评估他人情感的能力只有一部分是由自身情感/躯体反应的表征介导的。
