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Heartfelt Face Perception via the Interoceptive Pathway – an MEG study

The somatic marker hypothesis proposes that the cortical representation of visceral signals is a crucial component of emotion processing. No previous study has investigated the causal relationships among brain regions that process visceral information during emotional perception. In this magnetoencephalography study of 32 healthy subjects, heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEPs), which reflect the cortical processing of heartbeats, were modulated by the perception of a sad face. The modulation effect was localized to the prefrontal cortices, the globus pallidus, and an interoceptive network including the right anterior insula (RAI) and anterior cingulate cortex (RACC). Importantly, our Granger causality analysis provides the first evidence for increased causal flow of heartbeat information from the RAI to the RACC during sad face perception. Moreover, this HEP modulation effect was neither an artefact nor an effect of visual-evoked potentials. These findings provide important progress in the understanding of brain-body interactions during emotion processing.