Folk psychology advocates the existence of gender differences in socio-cognitive functions such as 'reading' the mental states of others or discerning subtle differences in body-language. A female advantage has been demonstrated for emotion recognition from facial expressions, but virtually nothing is known about gender differences in recognizing bodily stimuli or body language. The aim of the ...

This study aimed to investigate how the impairment of the olfactory system influences interoception. Interoception is known as the awareness of one's body or the sense of the condition of the body; more precisely, this construct is defined as the processing, representation, and perception of the internal physical state. Interoceptive sensitivity and chemosensory performance were assessed in 77 ...

Anecdotal reports that time "flies by" or "slows down" during emotional events are supported by evidence that the motivational relevance of stimuli influences subsequent duration judgments. Yet it is unknown whether the subjective quality of events as they unfold is altered by motivational relevance. In a novel paradigm, we measured the subjective experience of moment-to-moment visual perceptio...

We assessed the reliability of the Medical Outcomes Study Short Form Health Survey (SF-20) in a heterogeneous group of persons seeking drug and alcohol treatment. Patients (n = 2688) seeking detoxification and treatment at four intake sites for Addiction Treatment in Boston, Massachusetts, received all components of the SF-20 including physical, role, and social functioning; mental health; heal...

What is it like to be invisible? This question has long fascinated man and has been the central theme of many classic literary works. Recent advances in materials science suggest that invisibility cloaking of the human body may be possible in the not-so-distant future. However, it remains unknown how invisibility affects body perception and embodied cognition. To address these questions, we dev...

and related mechanisms at the temporo-parietal junction might thus allow us to improve our neuroscientific models of self and corporeal awareness. Although many other cortical areas are involved in self processing, recent neuroimaging studies indicate a key role for the temporo-parietal junction. This is not only true for out of body experiences but also for many aspects of body and self proces...

Historically, the bodily senses have often been regarded as impeccable sources of spatial information and as being the teacher of vision. Here, the authors report that the haptic perception of slope by means of the foot is greatly exaggerated. The exaggeration is present in verbal as well as proprioceptive judgments. It is shown that this misperception of pedal slope is not caused by calibratio...

This research focuses on continuous dimensional affect recognition from bodily expressions using feature optimization and adaptive regression. Both static posture and dynamic motion bodily features are extracted in this research. A hybrid particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is proposed for feature selection, which overcomes premature convergence and local optimum trap encountered by con...

This paper reviews the research pertaining to the emotional and cultural determinants of felt bodily sensations. First, the relevant empirical literature addressing actual physiological arousal in emotion is presented. In a subsequent section, the cultural variation of actual physiological changes during emotion induction are examined. Then the review focuses not on the actual physiological cha...