Autonomous system models of interoception describe perception of bodily sensations as an active process in which the brain generates and tests hypotheses about the body on the basis of proximal information. This view of perception as inference allows a new perspective on the role of affect in perception. Affect and interoception are closely linked, but processes underlying this link are poorly ...

Psychology suggests highly synchronized expressions of emotion across different modalities. Few experiments jointly studied the relative contribution of facial expression and body posture to the overall perception of emotion. Computational models for expressive virtual characters have to consider how such combinations will be perceived by users. This paper reports on two studies exploring how s...

BACKGROUND Little work has been done to investigate the suggestion that the use of selected scales from a multi-scale health-status questionnaire would compromise reliability and validity. The aim of this study was to compare the performance of three scales selected from the SF-36 generic health questionnaire when administered in isolation or within the entire SF-36 to patients with musculoskel...

3 The finding of Herbert and colleagues (2012) in the January 4 issue of Biological Psychology sheds interesting new perspectives 5 on the correspondence between homeostatic challenges and accu6 racy of heartbeat perception. One of their conclusions is that 7 changes in autonomic activity, which in their study were induced 8 by short-term fasting, intensify overall Interoceptive Awareness 9 (IA...

OBJECTIVE To compare neurologist and patient perceptions of multiple sclerosis (MS)-related health status. METHODS MS patients (n=99) were recruited from six sites in Canada. Following a consultation with their neurologist, patients estimated their relapse frequency, rated their general health and quality of life (QoL), reviewed descriptions of eight health domains and selected the three most...

Over the years observational studies have made great progress in characterizing children's visual experiences and their sensitivity to social cues and their role in language development. Recent technological advancements have allowed researchers to study these issues from the child's perspective, leading to a new understanding of the dynamic involvement of bodily events. A number of recent stud...

BACKGROUND Within the context of applied bioethical reasoning, various conceptions of the human body are focused upon by the author in relation to normative notions of autonomy. RESULTS The author begins by descriptively exploring some main positions in bioethics from which the "body" is conceptualized. Such positions conflict: the body is that which is constitutive of the individual's experi...

Spatial perspective taking is a crucial social skill that underlies many of our everyday interactions. Previous studies have suggested that spatial perspective taking is an embodied process that involves the integration of both motor and proprioceptive information. Given the importance of vestibular signals for own-body perception, mental own-body imagery, and bodily self-consciousness, in the ...

The problem of which cues, internal or external, permit a person to label and identify his own emotional state has been with us since the days that James (1890) first tendered his doctrine that "the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion" (p. 449). Since we are aware of a variety of feeling and em...