Haar A J H, Jain A, Schoeller F, Maes P
Fluid Interfaces Group, Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA.
Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires, Paris, France.
Sci Rep. 2020 Dec 10;10(1):21603. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-77951-w.
Previous studies on aesthetic chills (i.e., psychogenic shivers) demonstrate their positive effects on stress, pleasure, and social cognition. We tested whether we could artificially enhance this emotion and its downstream effects by intervening on its somatic markers using wearable technology. We built a device generating cold and vibrotactile sensations down the spine of subjects in temporal conjunction with a chill-eliciting audiovisual stimulus, enhancing the somatosensation of cold underlying aesthetic chills. Results suggest that participants wearing the device experienced significantly more chills, and chills of greater intensity. Further, these subjects reported sharing the feelings expressed in the stimulus to a greater degree, and felt more pleasure during the experience. These preliminary results demonstrate that emotion prosthetics and somatosensory interfaces offer new possibilities of modulating human emotions from the bottom-up (body to mind). Future challenges will include testing the device on a larger sample and diversifying the type of stimuli to account for negatively valenced chills and intercultural differences. Interoceptive technologies offer a new paradigm for affective neuroscience, allowing controlled intervention on conscious feelings and their downstream effects on higher-order cognition.
先前关于审美寒战(即心因性颤抖)的研究表明,它们对压力、愉悦感和社会认知具有积极影响。我们测试了是否可以通过使用可穿戴技术干预其躯体标记来人为增强这种情绪及其下游效应。我们制造了一种设备,该设备在与引发寒战的视听刺激同时作用于受试者的脊柱,产生寒冷和振动触觉感受,增强了审美寒战背后的冷觉躯体感觉。结果表明,佩戴该设备的参与者经历了明显更多的寒战,且寒战强度更大。此外,这些受试者报告称在更大程度上分享了刺激中表达的情感,并且在体验过程中感到更愉悦。这些初步结果表明,情感假肢和躯体感觉接口为自下而上(从身体到心理)调节人类情绪提供了新的可能性。未来的挑战将包括在更大的样本上测试该设备,并使刺激类型多样化,以考虑负性情绪寒战和文化差异。内感受技术为情感神经科学提供了一种新范式,允许对有意识的感觉及其对高阶认知的下游效应进行可控干预。