Bodily Information and Top-Down Affective Priming Jointly Affect the Processing of Fearful Faces

According to embodied theories, the processing of emotions such as happiness or fear is grounded in emotion-specific perceptual, bodily, and physiological processes. Under these views, perceiving an emotional stimulus (e.g., a fearful face) re-enacts interoceptive bodily states congruent with that emotion increases heart rate); turn, changes rate) influence content. A previous study by Pezzulo et al. (2018) provided evidence for this congruence, reporting experimentally increasing rate physical exercise facilitated facial expressions interoception (fear), but not those conveying incongruent (disgust neutrality). Here, we investigated whether above (bottom-up) manipulation (top-down) priming affective content may jointly happy faces. The fact are both associated high have different (positive negative) valence permits testing hypothesis their might be same (the increase two opposite primes. To test hypothesis, asked participants perform gender-categorization task happy, fearful, neutral faces, which were preceded positive, negative, Participants performed sessions (after rest, normal rate, exercise, faster recorded response times mouse movements during choices. We replicated finding when condition, they processed faces than rest condition. However, did find reduction time (or neutral) Furthermore, found presence negative compared positive primes; no equivalent facilitation primes While asymmetries between require further investigation, our findings promisingly indicate influenced bottom-up top-down emotion.