Feldman Mallory J, Siegel Erika, Barrett Lisa Feldman, Quigley Karen S, Wormwood Jolie B
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 231 E. Cameron Ave, Chapel Hill, NC 27514 USA.
Hewlett Packard, Inc, San Francisco, CA USA.
Affect Sci. 2022 Apr 28;3(2):464-479. doi: 10.1007/s42761-022-00114-9. eCollection 2022 Jun.
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.
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00114-9.
人类会赋予其感知对象情感意义，这一现象被称为情感现实主义。情感现实主义假说提出，大脑持续预测感觉的意义（例如，将一种声音识别为警笛声，或将一组视觉图像识别为一张脸），部分是通过表征身体的当前状态以及过去类似感官事件所带来的直接生理影响。然而，生理活动对情感现实主义体验的确切贡献仍然未知。在本研究中，参与者在对显示中性表情的目标面孔进行社会评价判断时，记录了他们的外周生理活动。目标面孔与情感图像同时呈现，情感图像通过连续闪光抑制从可报告的意识中被抑制。结果显示了情感现实主义的证据——与被抑制的负面刺激相比，当目标面孔与被抑制的正面刺激配对时，参与者对目标面孔的评价更积极——但在心脏内感受性敏感性较高的个体中，这种效应明显不那么显著。此外，虽然在被抑制的情感刺激条件下观察到外周生理活动存在一些适度差异，但对情感刺激的生理反应并不能直接预测社会评价判断。我们探讨了这些发现对于情感理论以及详细阐述内感受在第一人称主观性体验中的作用的理论的意义。
在线版本包含可在10.1007/s42761-022-00114-9获取的补充材料。
