Alteroception & Emotional Intelligence: Cardiorespiratory Cues in Emotion Recognition

Abstract

Recognizing emotions accurately is essential for successful social interactions. While traditional research on emotion recognition focuses on explicit external cues such as facial expressions and body language, recent findings suggest that subtle physiological signals like heart rate and respiration might also play a role. Two recent studies show that people can infer others’ physiological states from visual cues: Galvez-Pol et al. [1] found that individuals can match heartbeats to faces, while Arslanova et al. [2] linked this ability to interoceptive accuracy and social intelligence. These findings highlight the importance of a largely understudied mechanism: perceiving physiological signals in others, here defined as alteroception.

While interoception—the perception of one’s internal bodily signals—has received increasing interest in psychological research in recent years [3], alteroception remains relatively unexplored, especially in connection with emotional intelligence. This study investigates whether individuals’ ability to visually perceive others’ heart rate and breathing patterns is related to their emotional intelligence, specifically their emotion recognition abilities. The project builds on a previously conducted feasability study, where participants viewed short video clips displaying synchronized heart rate and respiration data through visual animations. Preliminary results suggested that participants were able to identify these physiological signals; however, the study was small in scale and did not include measures of emotional intelligence.

In the current study proposal, we aim to recruit 300 participants to complete a set of tasks involving video stimuli of ten individuals. Each video features animated representations of heart rate or respiration. Participants will be shown side-by-side videos of two individuals and asked to decide which person the visual representation of heart rate and/or respiration belongs to, making a forced-choice judgment. Emotional intelligence will be assessed using established measures of emotion recognition abilities. We hypothesize that participants with higher emotional intelligence scores will demonstrate greater accuracy in perceiving others’ physiological signals.

This research connects perceptual processes to social cognition, highlighting subtle bodily cues' role in emotion recognition. The findings might contribute to theories of embodied and enactive cognition, proposing a mechanism —alteroception—that might contribute to understanding emotions in others. Practically, the results may inform future interventions for improving social-emotional skills in individuals who rely heavily on nonverbal cues, such as caregivers, educators, or people with atypical social development. Correlational evidence for a link between emotional intelligence and perception of heart rate and respiration would build a foundation for supporting integrating physiological signal perception into broader models of emotion recognition and social interaction.

References

[1] A. Galvez-Pol, S. Antoine, C. Li, and J. M. Kilner, “People can identify the likely owner of heartbeats by looking at individuals’ faces,” Cortex, vol. 151, pp. 176–187, 2022. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2022.03.003.

[2] I. Arslanova, A. Galvez-Pol, J. M. Kilner, G. Finotti, and M. Tsakiris, “Seeing through each other’s hearts: Inferring others’ heart rate as a function of own heart rate perception and perceived social intelligence,” Affective Science, vol. 3, pp. 862–877, 2022. doi: 10.1007/s42761-022-00151-4.

[3] H. D. Critchley and S. N. Garfinkel, “Interoception and emotion,” Current Opinion in Psychology, vol. 17, pp. 7–14, 2017. doi: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.04.020.