Giulia Poerio

University of Essex · Department of Psychology

The characterisation of autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) as an audio-visual phenomenon overlooks how tactile experiences are not just perceptual concurrents of ASMR (i.e., tingling) but also commonly strong ASMR inducers. Here we systematically investigated whether ASMR-responders show altered tactile processing compared to controls. Usi...

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a complex sensory-emotional experience characterized by pleasant tingling sensations originating at the scalp. ASMR is triggered in some people (called ASMR-responders) by stimuli including whispering, personal attention, and crisp sounds (termed ASMR triggers). Since its inception, ASMR has been liken...

Understanding how age-related changes in cognition manifest in the real world is an important goal for aging research. One means of capturing these changes involves “experience sampling” participant’s self-reported thoughts as they go about their daily lives. Previous research using this method has shown age-related changes in ongoing thought: e.g....

ASMR is a complex positive emotion experienced by some people in response to triggers including auditory, visual, interpersonal and tactile stimuli. We propose that the ability to experience ASMR and its resulting intensity might be underlined by individual differences in sensory sensitivity to exteroceptive and interoceptive cues. In a pre-registe...

Understanding how age-related changes in cognition manifest in the real world is an important goal. One means of capturing these changes involves “experience sampling” participant’s self-reported thoughts. Research has shown age-related changes in ongoing thought: e.g., older adults have fewer thoughts unrelated to the here-and-now. However, it is...

The COVID-19 pandemic led to lockdowns in countries across the world, changing the lives of billions of people. The United Kingdom’s first national lockdown, for example, restricted people’s ability to socialize and work. The current study examined how changes to socializing and working during this lockdown impacted ongoing thought patterns in dail...

We have entered a research proposal into Prolific.co's £10k research grant competition. The competition is to win £10k for a research project; the top 5 most popular projects (based on community votes) will be shortlisted with a final winner chosen by Prolific. We plan to use the money to run a large "ASMR screening" tool on the prolific platform,...

A core goal in cognitive neuroscience is identifying the physical substrates of the patterns of thought that occupy our daily lives. Contemporary views suggest that the landscape of ongoing experience is heterogeneous and can be influenced by features of both the person and the context. This perspective piece considers recent work that explicitly a...

When unoccupied by an explicit external task, humans engage in a wide range of different types of self-generated thinking. These are often unrelated to the immediate environment and have unique psychological features. Although contemporary perspectives on ongoing thought recognise the heterogeneity of these self-generated states, we lack both a cle...

This entry provides an overview of extant research on the phenomenon of autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR). ASMR is a pleasant tingling sensation (often described as “brain tingles”) that some people experience in response to a set of triggers including whispering, tapping, and soft speaking. Now, nearly 10 years since the term ASMR was co...

Evidence about the impact of art on well-being is confined to studies of participatory arts and receptive arts that involve attending cultural events. This investigation examined the impact of art on well-being by framing people's engagement with art as encounters with artistic imagination. These encounters include traditional forms of cultural act...

Human cognition is not always tethered to events in the external world. Laboratory and real world experience sampling studies reveal that attention is often devoted to self-generated mental content rather than to events taking place in the immediate environment. Recent studies have begun to explicitly examine the consistency between states of off-t...

Contemporary views of brain function emphasise that neural processing is organised along multiple macro-scale hierarchies that describe the relationship between large-scale networks. Examples include the organisation of networks on a continuum from unimodal to transmodal function, as well as the characteristic response of the brain to tasks. Our st...

Neural activity within the default mode network (DMN) is widely assumed to relate to processing during off-task states, however it remains unclear whether this association emerges from a shared role in self or social content that is common in these conditions. In the current study, we examine the possibility that the role of the DMN in ongoing thou...

Research has examined the psychological benefits of fiction, particularly for socio-cognitive and interpersonal processes, but has yet to examine whether it can have an impact on individuals’ personal well-being in a natural setting over time. A longitudinal randomized control trial (RCT) using audiobooks was conducted to compare the effects of fic...

Ageing provides an interesting window into semantic cognition: while younger adults generally outperform older adults on many cognitive tasks, knowledge continues to accumulate over the lifespan and consequently, the semantic store (i.e., vocabulary size) remains stable (or even improves) during healthy ageing. Semantic cognition involves the inter...

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) — the sensory phenomenon experienced by some people in response to visual and auditory stimuli such as whispering — has attracted substantial public attention but is not yet well understood or well established within the scientific community. Recent research published in PeerJ by Cash, Heisick and Papesh...

Humans spend a large proportion of their time engaged in thoughts unrelated to the task being performed, a tendency that declines with age. However, a clear neuro-cognitive account of what underlies this decrease is lacking. This study addresses the possibility that age-related changes in off-task thinking are correlated with changes in the intrins...

Neural activity within the default mode network (DMN) is widely assumed to relate to processing during off-task states, however it remains unclear whether this association emerges from a shared role in self or social cognition. In the current study, we examine the possibility that the role of the DMN in ongoing thought emerges from contributions to...

Exploding head syndrome is a sensory parasomnia characterized by the perception of loud noises and/or a sense of explosion in the head that occurs when transitioning to or from sleep. Despite receiving little attention from both researchers and clinicians, studies suggest that approximately 10%-15% of individuals have episodes, with significant lev...

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) – the sensory phenomenon experienced by some people in response to visual and auditory stimuli such as whispering – has attracted substantial public attention but is not yet well-understood or well-established within the scientific community. Recent research published in PeerJ by Cash, Heisick, & Papesh (...

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) – the sensory phenomenon experienced by some people in response to visual and auditory stimuli such as whispering – has attracted substantial public attention but is not yet well-understood or well-established within the scientific community. Recent research published in PeerJ by Cash, Heisick, & Papesh (...

Conscious experience is dynamic, and its fluidity is particularly marked when attention is not occupied by events in the external world and our minds are free to wander. Our study used measures of neural function, and advanced analyses techniques to examine how unconstrained neural state transitions relate to patterns of ongoing experience. Neural...

Regions of transmodal cortex, in particular the default mode network (DMN), have historically been argued to serve functions unrelated to task performance, in part because of associations with naturally occurring periods of off-task thought. In contrast, contemporary views of the DMN suggest it plays an integrative role in cognition that emerges fr...

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) describes the experience of tingling sensations in the crown of the head, in response to a range of audio-visual triggers such as whispering, tapping, and hand movements. Public interest in ASMR has risen dramatically and ASMR experiencers watch ASMR videos to promote relaxation and sleep. Unlike ostensib...

Trait level differences between ASMR and non-ASMR participants. (DOCX)

The tendency for the mind to wander to concerns other than the task in hand is a fundamental feature of human cognition, yet the consequence of variations in its experiential content for psychological functioning are not well understood. Here, we adopted a multivariate pattern analysis approach, simultaneously decomposing experience sampling data w...

A long-standing literature implicates activity within the default mode network (DMN) to processes linked to the self. However, contemporary work suggests that other large-scale networks networks might also be involved. For instance, goal-directed autobiographical planning requires positive functional connectivity (FC) between DMN and frontoparietal...

Experiences such as mind-wandering illustrate that cognition is not always tethered to events in the here-and-now. Although converging evidence emphasises the default mode network (DMN) in mind-wandering, its precise contribution remains unclear. The DMN comprises cortical regions that are maximally distant from primary sensory and motor cortex, a...

The tendency for the mind to wander to concerns other than the task in hand is a fundamental feature of human cognition, yet the consequence of variations in its experiential content for psychological functioning are not well understood. Here, we adopted a multivariate pattern analysis approach, simultaneously decomposing experience sampling data w...

A substantial portion of daily life is spent daydreaming—that is, engaged in thought independent of, and unrelated to, goals in the external environment. We argue that this naturally occurring, unconstrained cognition is a vital, but currently underappreciated, form of social cognition that enables navigation of the social world. First, we present...

Giulia Poerio?s public engagement work with Hubbub has featured her psychological research on autonomous sensory meridian response(ASMR)?relaxing, tingling sensations that start at the top of the head and spread down the neck, spine and sometimes throughout the rest of the body, usually in response to certain triggers. Giulia?s collaborative studie...

This study examined in real time the role of sleep and daydreaming as potentiating states for subsequent dissociation in depersonalization/derealization disorder (DDD). Research and theory suggests that dissociation may be exacerbated and maintained by a labile sleep-wake cycle in which “dream-like” mentation intrudes into waking life and fuels dis...

Sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming are both dissociated experiences related to rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Anecdotal evidence suggests that episodes of sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming are related but different experiences. In this study we test this claim systematically for the first time in an online survey with 1928 participants (age range...

Estimates suggest that up to half of waking life is spent daydreaming; that is, engaged in thought that is independent of, and unrelated to, one’s current task. Emerging research indicates that daydreams are predominately social suggesting that daydreams may serve socio-emotional functions. Here we explore the functional role of social daydreaming...

People are known to engage in behaviours aimed at replenishing social connectedness after their sense of belonging is threatened. We explored whether the mental strategy of daydreaming about significant others could have similar effects by acting as an imaginary substitute when loved ones are unavailable. Following a loneliness induction, participa...

Social relationships and interactions contribute to daily emotional well-being. The emotional benefits that come from engaging with others are known to arise from real events, but do they also come from the imagination during daydreaming activity? Using experience sampling methodology with 101 participants, we obtained 371 reports of naturally occu...

Mind-wandering is closely connected with negative mood. Whether negative mood is a cause or consequence of mind-wandering remains an important, unresolved, issue. We sought to clarify the direction of this relationship by measuring mood before and after mind-wandering. We also measured the affective content, time-orientation and relevance of mind-w...

Background: This investigation focuses on what occurs to individuals' self-regulatory resource during controlled Interpersonal Affect Regulation (IAR) which is the process of deliberately influencing the internal feeling states of others. Combining the strength model of self-regulation and the resources conservation model, the investigation tested...