Listening to Your Heart and Feeling Yourself: Effects of Exposure to Interoceptive Signals During the Ultimatum Game

Overview

Journal Exp Brain Res

Specialty Neurology

Date 2013 Jul 23

PMID 23873493

Citations 18

Authors

Bigna Lenggenhager

Ruben T Azevedo

Alessandra Mancini

Salvatore Maria Aglioti

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

The ultimatum game (UG) is commonly used to study the tension between financial self-interest and social equity motives. Here, we investigated whether experimental exposure to interoceptive signals influences participants' behavior in the UG. Participants were presented with various bodily sounds--i.e., their own heart, another person's heart, or the sound of footsteps--while acting both in the role of responder and proposer. We found that listening to one's own heart sound, compared to the other bodily sounds: (1) increased subjective feelings of unfairness, but not rejection behavior, in response to unfair offers and (2) increased the unfair offers while playing in the proposer role. These findings suggest that heightened feedback of one's own visceral processes may increase a self-centered perspective and drive socioeconomic exchanges accordingly. In addition, this study introduces a valuable procedure to manipulate online the access to interoceptive signals and for exploring the interplay between viscero-sensory information and cognition.

Citing Articles

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Interoceptive accuracy is related to the psychological mechanisms of the burning mouth syndrome: a cross-sectional study.

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