Body ownership and the experimental psychology of the self.

Human experimental psychology seems inextricably bound up with a notion of self, or individual mental life. The link between self and body has always been acknowledged, but psychologists have few ways to investigate, analyze, or understand this link. As 2025 marks the 50th birthday of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance and 20 years since the publication of our "Re-Visiting the Rubber Hand Illusion" article in the journal, we take this opportunity to reflect on the impact, reach, and major developments that followed its publication.

The heart in attention: evidence for cardiac phase effects in alerting but not executive control.

Across two experiments, we examined the role of phasic cardiac fluctuations - whether the heart contracts (systole) or relaxes (diastole) - on two attentional mechanisms: executive control (EC) and alerting. Empirical evidence for cardiac phase effects in alerting has been missing, and studies on EC have found mixed results. Thus, we disentangled how cardiac fluctuations affect alerting and EC, separately and then together, using a subset of highly validated Attentional Network Test (ANT).

Somatosensory false feedback biases emotional ratings through interoceptive embodiment.

Mismatches between perceived and veridical physiological signals during false feedback (FFB) can bias emotional judgements. Paradigms using auditory FFB suggest perceived changes in heart rate (HR) increase ratings of emotional intensity irrespective of feedback type (increased or decreased HR), implicating right anterior insula as a mismatch comparator between exteroceptive and interoceptive information. However, few paradigms have examined effects of somatosensory FFB.

Respiratory and cardiac interoceptive sensitivity in the first two years of life.

Several recent theoretical accounts have posited that interoception, the perception of internal bodily signals, plays a vital role in early human development. Yet, empirical evidence of cardiac interoceptive sensitivity in infants to date has been mixed. Furthermore, existing evidence does not go beyond the perception of cardiac signals and focuses only on the age of 5-7 mo, limiting the generalizability of the results.

Perceptions of science, science communication, and climate change attitudes in 68 countries - the TISP dataset.

Science is integral to society because it can inform individual, government, corporate, and civil society decision-making on issues such as public health, new technologies or climate change. Yet, public distrust and populist sentiment challenge the relationship between science and society. To help researchers analyse the science-society nexus across different geographical and cultural contexts, we undertook a cross-sectional population survey resulting in a dataset of 71,922 participants in 68 countries.

A leader I can(not) trust: understanding the path from epistemic trust to political leader choices via dogmatism.

There is growing concern about the impact of declining political trust on democracies. Psychological research has introduced the concept of epistemic (mis)trust as a stable disposition acquired through development, which may influence our sociopolitical engagement. Given trust's prominence in current politics, we examined the relationship between epistemic trust and people's choices of (un)trustworthy political leaders.

Maternal interoceptive focus is associated with greater reported engagement in mother-infant stroking and rocking.

Parental caregiving during infancy is primarily aimed at the regulation of infants' physiological and emotional states. Recent models of embodied cognition propose that interoception, i.e.

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) in the wild: Remote heart rate imaging via online webcams.

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) is a low-cost technique to measure physiological parameters such as heart rate by analyzing videos of a person. There has been growing attention to this technique due to the increased possibilities and demand for running psychological experiments on online platforms. Technological advancements in commercially available cameras and video processing algorithms have led to significant progress in this field.

Uncovering the potential of evaluative conditioning in shaping attitudes toward sustainable product packaging.

Introduction: The necessity to promote pro-environmental behavior change in individuals and society is increasingly evident. This study aimed to investigate the effect of evaluative conditioning on consumers' perception of product packaging.

Methods: We first produced two stimulus sets: one including images of supermarket products with different packaging and the other containing affective images of healthy nature (positive) and climate change impact (negative).

With hand on heart: A cardiac Rubber Hand Illusion.

Body illusions such as the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) have highlighted how multisensory integration underpins the sense of one's own body. Much of this research has focused on senses arising from outside the body (e.g.

The count: an identity-based intervention to counter partisan misinformation sharing.

Interventions to counter misinformation are often less effective for polarizing content on social media platforms. We sought to overcome this limitation by testing an identity-based intervention, which aims to promote accuracy by incorporating normative cues directly into the social media user interface. Across three pre-registered experiments in the US ( = 1709) and UK ( = 804), we found that crowdsourcing accuracy judgements by adding a count (next to the count) reduced participants' reported likelihood to share inaccurate information about partisan issues by 25% (compared with a control condition).

Interoceptive technologies for psychiatric interventions: From diagnosis to clinical applications.

Interoception-the perception of internal bodily signals-has emerged as an area of interest due to its implications in emotion and the prevalence of dysfunctional interoceptive processes across psychopathological conditions. Despite the importance of interoception in cognitive neuroscience and psychiatry, its experimental manipulation remains technically challenging. This is due to the invasive nature of existing methods, the limitation of self-report and unimodal measures of interoception, and the absence of standardized approaches across disparate fields.

Evidence that pupil dilation and cardiac afferent signalling differentially impact the processing of emotional intensity and racial bias.

Interoceptive cardiac arousal signals (e.g., from baroreceptor firing at ventricular systole compared to diastole) have been found to enhance perception of fearful versus neutral faces.

Social interoception: Perceiving events during cardiac afferent activity makes people more suggestible to other people's influence.

Our judgements are often influenced by other people's views and opinions. Interoception also influences decision making, but little is known about its role in social influence and particularly, the extent to which other people may influence our decisions. Across two experiments, using different forms of social influence, participants judged the trustworthiness of faces presented either during the systolic phase of the cardiac cycle, when baroreceptors convey information from the heart to the brain, or during diastolic phase, when baroreceptors are quiescent.

Mapping moral language on US presidential primary campaigns reveals rhetorical networks of political division and unity.

During political campaigns, candidates use rhetoric to advance competing visions and assessments of their country. Research reveals that the moral language used in this rhetoric can significantly influence citizens' political attitudes and behaviors; however, the moral language actually used in the rhetoric of elites during political campaigns remains understudied. Using a data set of every tweet () published by 39 US presidential candidates during the 2016 and 2020 primary elections, we extracted moral language and constructed network models illustrating how candidates' rhetoric is semantically connected.

Re-cognizing the new self: The neurocognitive plasticity of self-processing following facial transplantation.

The face is a defining feature of our individuality, crucial for our social interactions. But what happens when the face connected to the self is radically altered or replaced? We address the plasticity of self-face recognition in the context of facial transplantation. While the of a new face following facial transplantation is a medical fact, the of a new identity is an unexplored psychological outcome.

Perceived time expands and contracts within each heartbeat.

Perception of passing time can be distorted. Emotional experiences, particularly arousal, can contract or expand experienced duration via their interactions with attentional and sensory processing mechanisms. Current models suggest that perceived duration can be encoded from accumulation processes and from temporally evolving neural dynamics.

Sensitive liberals and unfeeling conservatives? .

The stark divide between the political right and left is rooted in conflicting beliefs, values, and personality-and, recent research suggests, perhaps even lower-level physiological differences between individuals. In this registered report, we investigated a novel domain of ideological differences in physiological processes: interoceptive sensitivity-that is, a person's attunement to their own internal bodily states and signals (e.g.

On the realness of people who do not exist: The social processing of artificial faces.

Today more than ever, we are asked to evaluate the realness, truthfulness and trustworthiness of our social world. Here, we focus on how people evaluate realistic-looking faces of non-existing people generated by generative adversarial networks (GANs). GANs are increasingly used in marketing, journalism, social media, and political propaganda.

Seeing Through Each Other's Hearts: Inferring Others' Heart Rate as a Function of Own Heart Rate Perception and Perceived Social Intelligence.

Unlabelled: Successful social interactions require a good understanding of the emotional states of other people. This information is often not directly communicated but must be inferred. As all emotional experiences are also imbedded in the visceral or interoceptive state of the body (i.

From the Viscera to First Impressions: Phase-Dependent Cardio-Visual Signals Bias the Perceived Trustworthiness of Faces.

When we see new people, we rapidly form first impressions. Whereas past research has focused on the role of morphological or emotional cues, we asked whether transient visceral states bias the impressions we form. Across three studies ( = 94 university students), we investigated how fluctuations of bodily states, driven by the interoceptive impact of cardiac signals, influence the perceived trustworthiness of faces.