Seminario 6

Interoception: How the body shapes emotion and cognition

Žan Zelič

Interoception refers to the sensing, integration, and interpretation of signals originating from within the body. This seminar introduces the main pathways through which bodily signals reach the brain and the (sub)cortical structures involved in their processing, with particular emphasis on the insula. It then presents interoception as a multidimensional construct comprising accuracy, sensibility, and awareness, and reviews the main methods used to measure these dimensions, including behavioral tasks, self-report questionnaires, metacognitive measures, and physiological indices such as heartbeat-evoked potentials. The seminar further examines the role of interoception in emotion and cognition, focusing on how bodily signals shape emotional intensity and emotion regulation, as well as attention, memory, and decision-making. It also considers altered interoception as a potential transdiagnostic risk factor for psychopathology and introduces possible approaches to improving interoceptive functioning. In the final section, the seminar focuses on the relationship between interoception and hypnotizability, showing how individual differences in responsiveness to suggestions may be associated with differences in interoception and related phenomena, including emotion regulation, time perception, proneness to dissociative symptoms, and alterations in sense of agency and body ownership. The seminar concludes by considering how hypnotizability could inform the development of new forms of interoceptive training.

Prosocial Behaviour, Social Preferences, and Cognitive Modes: Insights from Experimental Economics

Pietro Guarnieri

Experimental economics has developed a wide range of paradigmatic experiments to investigate how individuals make decisions in social contexts. These experiments have played a central role in identifying and studying what economists call “social preferences”: motivations related to altruism, fairness, inequality aversion, cooperation, and other forms of prosocial behaviour. The talk will begin with a brief introduction to behavioural and experimental economic methods and to the concept of social preferences. This will provide the background for discussing a broader research question concerning the relationship between prosocial behaviour, prosocial motives, and different cognitive modes. In particular, the seminar will review some lines of research that interpret cooperation and prosociality through the lens of dual-process theories of cognition, distinguishing between intuitive and deliberative processes. The final part of the talk will focus on some conceptual and empirical limitations of this approach, opening the discussion to alternative perspectives and interdisciplinary challenges.