Neural Sensitivity to the Heartbeat Is Modulated by Fluctuations in Affective Arousal during Spontaneous Thought

Abstract

Spontaneous thoughts, occupying much of one's awake time in daily life, are often colored by emotional qualities. While spontaneous thoughts have been associated with various neural correlates, the relationship between subjective qualities of ongoing experiences and the brain's sensitivity to bodily signals (i.e., interoception) remains largely unexplored. Given the well-established role of interoception in emotion, clarifying this relationship may elucidate how processes relevant to mental health, such as arousal and anxiety, are regulated. We used EEG and ECG to measure the heartbeat-evoked potential (HEP), an index of interoceptive processing, while 51 adult participants (34 males, 20 females) visually fixated on a cross image and let their minds wander freely. At pseudorandom intervals, participants reported their momentary level of arousal. This measure of affective arousal was highly variable within and between individuals but was statistically unrelated to several markers of physiological arousal, including the heart rate, heart rate variability, time on task, and EEG alpha power at posterior electrodes. A cluster-based permutation analysis revealed that the HEP amplitude was increased during low relative to high affective arousal in a set of frontal electrodes during the 340–356 ms window after heartbeat onset. This HEP effect was more pronounced in individuals who reported high, relative to low, levels of trait anxiety. Together, our results offer novel evidence that at varying levels of trait anxiety, the brain differentially modulates sensitivity to bodily signals in coordination with the momentary, spontaneous experience of affective arousal—a mechanism that may operate independently of physiological arousal.