Manos Tsakiris

• PhD
• Royal Holloway University of London

Mismatches between perceived and veridical physiological signals during false feedback (FFB) can bias emotional judgements. Paradigms using auditory FFB suggest perceived changes in heart rate (HR) increase ratings of emotional intensity irrespective of feedback type (increased or decreased HR), implicating right anterior insula as a mismatch compa...

Several recent theoretical accounts have posited that interoception, the perception of internal bodily signals, plays a vital role in early human development. Yet, empirical evidence of cardiac interoceptive sensitivity in infants to date has been mixed. Furthermore, existing evidence does not go beyond the perception of cardiac signals and focuses...

Where does political ideology come from? Early research in political neuroscience has linked stronger physiological responses to threat and disgust with conservatism, implying a neurobiological basis of ideology, beyond societal factors. However, recent replication failures challenge the idea of a direct connection between physiological reactions a...

Several recent theoretical accounts have posited that interoception, the perception of internal bodily signals, plays a vital role in early human development. Yet, empirical evidence of cardiac interoceptive sensitivity in infants to date has been mixed. Furthermore, existing evidence does not go beyond the perception of cardiac signals and focuses...

Images are powerful cultural agents that can inform, shape and change the attitudes and behaviours of viewers. The ways in which marginalised groups are depicted in photographs shape people's attitudes towards them. For example, viewing photojournalistic images portraying refugees in large rather than small groups results in the infrahumanisation o...

There is growing concern about the impact of declining political trust on democracies. Psychological research has introduced the concept of epistemic (mis)trust as a stable disposition acquired through development, which may influence our sociopolitical engagement. Given trust’s prominence in current politics, we examined the relationship between e...

There is growing concern about the impact of political engagement on health. Consequently, interest has increased in how people cope with the effects of politics on their wellbeing. We applied an affective science framework to investigate whether interoceptive sensibility, i.e., attunement to our inner bodily feelings, can attenuate the extent to w...

Several recent theoretical accounts have posited that interoception, the perception of internal bodily signals, plays a vital role in early human development. Yet, empirical evidence of cardiac interoceptive sensitivity in infantsto date has been mixed. Furthermore, existing evidence does not go beyond the perception of cardiac signals and focuses...

Interoception, the perception of internal bodily signals such as heartbeat or respiration, is suggested to play an important role in early development. Infants are still developing the ability to regulate themselves and their bodily processes, which is proposed to evolve in interaction with the primary caregiver. However, it is unclear whether infa...

Mismatches between perceived and veridical physiological signals during false feedback (FFB) can bias emotional judgements. Paradigms using auditory FFB suggest perceived changes in heart rate (HR) increase ratings of emotional intensity irrespective of feedback type (increased or decreased HR), implicating right anterior insula as a mismatch compa...

Parental caregiving during infancy is primarily aimed at the regulation of infants’ physiological and emotional states. Recent models of embodied cognition propose that interoception, i.e., the perception of internal bodily states, may influence the quality and quantity of parent-infant caregiving. Yet, empirical investigations into this relationsh...

To limit the devastating effects of climate change, individuals need to engage in pro-environmental behaviours. Psychological interventions could be an effective tool for promoting such actions. However, previous work has measured the effectiveness of interventions on self-reported pro-environmental attitudes and neglected impacts on behaviour. Pro...

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) is a low-cost technique to measure physiological parameters such as heart rate by analyzing videos of a person. There has been growing attention to this technique due to the increased possibilities and demand for running psychological experiments on online platforms. Technological advancements in commercially avai...

Interventions to counter misinformation are often less effective for polarizing content on social media platforms. We sought to overcome this limitation by testing an identity-based intervention, which aims to promote accuracy by incorporating normative cues directly into the social media user interface. Across three pre-registered experiments in t...

Several recent theoretical accounts have posited that interoception, the perception of internal bodily signals, plays a vital role in early human development. Yet, empirical evidence of cardiac interoceptive sensitivity in infants to date has been mixed. Furthermore, existing evidence does not go beyond the perception of cardiac signals and focuses...

Several recent theoretical accounts have posited that interoception, the perception of internal bodily signals, plays a vital role in early human development. Yet, empirical evidence of cardiac interoceptive sensitivity in infants to date has been mixed. Furthermore, existing evidence does not go beyond the perception of cardiac signals and focuses...

Cuspis (Latin: [kuspis], meaning “sharp point”) is a MATLAB suite for presenting visual stimuli at different phases of the cardiac cycle and is designed to work with an MRI-compatible setup. Cuspis currently reads the electrocardiogram, detects the R-wave according to a user-defined threshold, and displays a visual stimulus with a specific stimulus...

We present a novel, non-invasive stimulation technique called Sonoception that utilizes synthetic auditory frequencies at 6Hz and 2Hz to activate respectively the left and right insula and, in turn, produce measurable neural and behavioral effects. We conducted three exploratory studies to test if and how Sonoception could modulate proxies of inter...

Racial-bias and stereotyping may be unconscious, yet discrimination and biased decisions can have devastating, even fatal, consequences. Such bias is influenced by interoceptive information concerning bodily physiology: Fear processing and racially-biased judgements of threat are augmented by phasic cardiac signals reflecting changes in cardiovascu...

Cuspis (Latin: [kuspis], meaning “sharp point”) is a MATLAB suite for presenting visual stimuli at different phases of the cardiac cycle and is designed to work with an MRI-compatible setup. Cuspis currently reads the electrocardiogram, detects the R-wave according to a user-defined threshold, and displays a visual stimulus with a specific stimulus...

Our judgements are often influenced by other people’s views and opinions. Interoception also influences decision making, but little is known about its role in social influence and particularly, the extent to which other people may influence our decisions. Across two experiments, using different forms of social influence, participants judged the tru...

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behaviour change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public...

Several recent theoretical accounts have posited that interoception, the perception of internal bodily signals, plays a vital role in early human development. Yet, to date, only one published study has reported evidence of cardiac interoceptive sensitivity in 5-month-old infants (Maister et al. 2017) whereas others reported mixed evidence. Furtherm...

Perception of passing time can be distorted.1 Emotional experiences, particularly arousal, can contract or expand experienced duration via their interactions with attentional and sensory processing mechanisms.2,3 Current models suggest that perceived duration can be encoded from accumulation processes4,5 and from temporally evolving neural dynamics...

Updating one’s beliefs about the causes and effects of climate change is crucial for altering attitudes and behaviours. Importantly, metacognitive abilities - insight into the (in)correctness of one’s beliefs- play a key role in the formation of polarised beliefs. We here aimed at investigated the role of metacognition in changing beliefs about cli...

The stark divide between the political right and left is rooted in conflicting beliefs, values, and personality—and, recent research suggests, perhaps even lower-level physiological differences between individuals. In this registered report, we investigated a novel domain of ideological differences in physiological processes: interoceptive sensitiv...

Today more than ever, we are asked to evaluate the realness, truthfulness and trustworthiness of our social world. Here, we focus on how people evaluate realistic-looking faces of non-existing people generated by generative adversarial networks (GANs). GANs are increasingly used in marketing, journalism, social media, and political propaganda. In t...

When we see new people, we rapidly form first impressions. Whereas past research has focused on the role of morphological or emotional cues, we asked whether transient visceral states bias the impressions we form. Across three studies ( N = 94 university students), we investigated how fluctuations of bodily states, driven by the interoceptive impac...

Unlabelled: Successful social interactions require a good understanding of the emotional states of other people. This information is often not directly communicated but must be inferred. As all emotional experiences are also imbedded in the visceral or interoceptive state of the body (i.e., accelerating heart rate during arousal), successfully inf...

The stark divide between the political right and left is rooted in conflicting beliefs, values, and personality—and, recent research suggests, perhaps even lower-level physiological differences between individuals. In this Registered Report, we investigated a novel domain of ideological differences in physiological processes: interoceptive sensitiv...

The experience of time is highly subjective. When we stare at the hands of a clock, a minute can feel much longer than when we are swept in a fun activity. Salient changes in external milieu (e.g., fluctuations in the visual scene) as well as in emotional states (e.g., arousal) have all been postulated to influence duration perception and the exper...

The need to feel in control is central to anorexia nervosa (AN). The sense of control in AN has only been studied through self-report. This study investigated whether implicit sense of control (sense of agency; SoA) differs across AN patients, recovered AN (RAN) patients and healthy controls (HC). Furthermore, we assessed whether state anxiety is i...

Past research has shown that anger is associated with support for confrontational and punitive responses during crises, and notably with the endorsement of authoritarian ideologies. One important question is whether it is anger generated specifically in a political context that explains the association between anger and specific political preferenc...

Significance The capacity to sense interoceptive signals is thought to be fundamental to broad functions including, but not limited to, homeostasis and the experience of the self. While neuroanatomical evidence suggests that nonhuman animals—namely, nonhuman primates—may possess features necessary for interoceptive processing in a way that is simil...

Remote photoplethysmography is a low-cost technique to measure physiological parameters such as the heartrate by analysing videos of a person. There has been growing attention in this technique due to the increased possibilities and demand for running psychological experiments in online platforms. Many progresses have been made due to technological...

Successful social interactions require a good understanding of the emotional states of other people. This information is often not directly communicated but must be inferred. As all emotional experiences are also imbedded in the visceral or interoceptive state of the body (i.e., accelerating heart rate during arousal), successfully inferring the in...

Our judgements are often influenced by others’ views and opinions. While interoception is known to influence decision making, little is known about its role in social influence and particularly, the extent to which other people may influence our decisions. Here, across two studies, we examined for the first time how cardiac interoceptive impact, ma...

Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) is a neuromodulatory technique that is thought to activate the Locus Coeruleus-Noradrenaline (LC-NA) system. Standard taVNS protocols consist of the administration of intermittent or continuous stimulation over long periods. However, there is currently a limited understanding of the temporal...

When we see new people we rapidly form first impressions. While past research has mostly focused on the role of morphological or emotional cues, we here ask whether the visceral states of the perceiver bias first impressions. Across 3 studies we investigated how “gut feelings”, driven by the interoceptive impact of cardiac signals, may influence th...

Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) is a neuromodulatory technique that is thought to activate the Locus Coeruleus-Noradrenaline (LC-NA) system. Standard taVNS protocols consist of the administration of intermittent or continuous stimulation over long periods. However, there is currently limited understanding of temporal dynami...

Is there a way to visually depict the image people “see” of themselves in their minds’ eyes? And if so, what can these mental images tell us about ourselves? We used a computational reverse-correlation technique to explore individuals’ mental “self-portraits” of their faces and body shapes in an unbiased, data-driven way (total N = 116 adults). Sel...

Updating one’s beliefs about the causes and effects of climate change is crucial for altering attitudes and behaviours. Importantly, metacognitive abilities - insight into the (in)correctness of one’s beliefs- play a key role in the formation of polarized beliefs. We investigated the role of domain-general and domain-specific metacognition in updat...

The need to feel in control is central to anorexia nervosa (AN). AN patients tend to use dysfunctional behaviour to feel a sense of control. The sense of control in AN has only been studied through self-report. The aim of this study is to investigate an implicit sense of control, the sense of agency (SoA), in AN patients, recovered AN (RAN) patient...

Standard measures of interoception are typically limited to the conscious perception of heartbeats. However, the fundamental purpose of interoceptive signaling, is to regulate the body. We present a novel biofeedback paradigm to explore the neurobehavioral consequences of three different types of engagement with cardiac interoception (Attend, Feel,...

At the heart of social cognition is our ability to distinguish between self and other and correctly attribute mental and affective states to their origin. Emotional egocentricity bias (EEB) reflects the tendency to use one’s own emotional state when relating to others. Although interoception underpins our emotional experience, little is known about...

Photojournalistic images shape our understanding of sociopolitical events. How humans are depicted in images may have far-reaching consequences for our attitudes towards them. Social psychology has shown how the visualization of an ‘identifiable victim effect’ can elicit empathic responses. However, images of identifiable victims in the media are t...

Influential theories posit that bodily responses are important for decision‐making under uncertainty. However, the evidence of the role of our ability to perceive subtle bodily changes (interoception) in decision‐making under uncertainty is mixed. These differences may arise from the fact that uncertainty, a part of daily decision‐making, can be fr...

In a recent study, Lush et al. (Nat Commun 11, 4853, 2020) claimed that they found “substantial relationships” between hypnotizability and experimental measures of the rubber hand illusion. The authors proposed that hypnotizable participants control their phenomenology to meet task expectations arising from the experimental paradigm. They further s...

Although the study of political behaviour has been traditionally restricted to the social sciences, new advances in political neuroscience and computational cognitive science highlight that the biological sciences can offer crucial insights into the roots of ideological thought and action. Echoing the dazzling diversity of human ideologies, this th...

While the study of affect and emotion has a long history in psychological sciences and neuroscience, the very question of how visceral states have come to the forefront of politics remains poorly understood. The concept of visceral politics captures how the physiological nature of our engagement with the social world influences how we make decision...

While the study of affect and emotion has a long history in psychological sciences and neuroscience, the very question of how visceral states have come to the forefront of politics remains poorly understood. The concept of visceral politics captures how the physiological nature of our engagement with the social world influences how we make decision...

A growing body of research suggests that perception and cognition are affected by fluctuating bodily states. For example, the rate of information sampling is coupled with cardiac phases. However, the benefits of such spontaneous coupling between bodily oscillations and decision-making remains unclear. Here, we studied the role of the cardiac cycle...

We explore dance video clip stimuli as a means to test human observers' accuracy in detecting genuine emotional expressivity in full-body movements. Stimuli of every-day-type full-body expressions of emotions usually use culturally very recognizable actions (e.g. fist shaking for anger, etc). However, expressive dance movement stimuli can be create...

The perception of being located within one's body (i.e., bodily self-location) is an essential feature of everyday self-experience. However, by manipulating exteroceptive input, healthy participants can easily be induced to perceive themselves as being spatially dislocated from their physical bodies. It has previously been suggested that interocept...

Body awareness is constructed by signals originating from within and outside the body. How do these apparently divergent signals converge? We developed a signal detection task to study the neural convergence and divergence of interoceptive and somatosensory signals. Participants focused on either cardiac or tactile events and reported their presenc...

We explore dance video clip stimuli as a means to test human observers’ accuracy in detecting genuine emotional expressivity in full-body movements. Stimuli of every-day-type full-body expressions of emotions usually use culturally very recognizable actions (e.g. fist shaking for anger, etc). By contrast, expressive dance movement stimuli can be cr...

Photography and photojournalism frame our experience of the world, especially in a culture powered by images at an unprecedented level. Images in the digital age and the era of alternative facts mediate our relations to other human beings and make our negotiation between what is real or fake challenging. We investigated how our visceral responses,...

Erogenous zones of the body are sexually arousing when touched. Previous investigations of erogenous zones were restricted to the effects of touch on one’s own body. However, sexual interactions do not just involve being touched, but also involve touching a partner and mutually looking at each other’s bodies. We take a novel interpersonal approach...

In this project, we want to investigate if people behave differently when seeing faces of non-existing people (artificially generated faces)

The sense of agency describes the experience of controlling one’s body to cause desired effects in the world. We explored whether this is influenced by interoceptive processes. Specifically, we investigated whether the sense of agency changes depending on where, in the cardiac cycle (systole or diastole), the action was executed and where the outco...

Body awareness is constructed by signals originating from within and outside the body. How do these apparently divergent signals converge? We developed a signal detection task to study the neural convergence and divergence of interoceptive and somatosensory signals. Participants focused on either cardiac or tactile events and reported their presenc...

Adults experience greater self-other bodily overlap in romantic than platonic relationships. One of the closest relationships is between mother and infant, yet little is known about their mutual bodily representations. This study measured infants' sensitivity to bodily overlap with their mother. Twenty-one 6- to 8-month-olds watched their mother's...

The ability to experience others’ emotional states is a key component in social interactions. Uniquely among sensorimotor regions, the somatosensory cortex (SCx) plays an especially important role in human emotion understanding. While distinct emotions are experienced in specific parts of the body, it remains unknown whether the SCx exhibits somato...

Previous research showed that anger is associated with support for confrontational and punitive responses during crises, and with endorsement of authoritarian ideologies. Here, we were interested in how anger can change our choices of political leaders. In line with past research, we predicted that anger would increase preferences for authoritarian...

How do we ‘see’ ourselves in our mind’s eye? The question of how we represent our self has been at the centre of cultural practices across centuries, as the long tradition of self-portraits attests, and at the centre of our understanding of mental health issues such as body-image disorders. By implementing a reverse-correlation technique to measure...

A recent paper by Zamariola and colleagues is widely cited as an authority on the invalidity of the Heartbeat Counting Task as a measure of interoceptive accuracy. Given the widespread interest in this field, it is essential that papers about methods are conceptually sound. However, only one of the authors' four criticisms appears substantiated - t...

A recent paper by Zamariola and colleagues is widely cited as an authority on the invalidity of the Heartbeat Counting Task as a measure of interoceptive accuracy. Given the widespread interest in this field, it is essential that papers about methods are conceptually and empirically sound. However, only one of the authors’ four criticisms appears t...

We often use our own emotions to understand other people’s emotions. However, emotional egocentric biases (EEB), namely the tendency to use one’s own emotional state when relating to others’ emotions, may hinder this process, especially when emotions are incongruent. We capitalised on the classic EEB task to develop a new version that is easier to...

At the heart of social cognition is our ability to distinguish between self and other and correctly attribute mental and affective states to their origin. Emotional egocentricity bias (EEB) reflects the tendency to use one’s own emotional state when relating to others. Although interoception underpins our emotional experience, little is known about...

At the heart of social cognition is our ability to distinguish between self and other and correctly attribute mental and affective states to their origin. Emotional egocentricity bias (EEB) reflects the tendency to use one’s own emotional state when relating to others. Although interoception underpins our emotional experience, little is known about...

The maintenance of psycho-physiological stability requires the ability to infer the state of our body (interoception) and to predict its future evolution. Yet standard measures of interoception do not have this functional approach as they are typically limited to the conscious perception of single heartbeats. We here present a new biofeedback parad...

The experience of one's embodied sense of self is dependent on the integration of signals originating both from within and outwith one's body. During the processing and integration of these signals, the bodily self must maintain a fine balance between stability and malleability. Here we investigate the potential role of autonomic responses in inter...

How can interoceptive accuracy, i.e. the objective ability to identify interoceptive signals, be improved? In the present study, we investigated whether non-invasive stimulation of the auricular branch of the vagus nerve (taVNS) modulates cardiac interoceptive accuracy, interoceptive sensibility, i.e. confidence in the identification of bodily sign...

The experience of one’s embodied sense of self is dependent on the integration of signals originating both from within and outwith one’s body. During the processing and integration of these signals, the bodily self must maintain a fine balance between stability and malleability. Here we investigate the potential role of autonomic responses in inter...

Interoception research is hampered by the lack of an agreed gold standard test of interoceptive accuracy. To avoid several confounds of heartbeat perception tasks, we devised a novel method of ‘heartbeat matching’, whereby participants use a custom-made slider to adjust the rate at which a heart icon is pulsing on a PC screen, to match this to the...

Interoception describes the processing and awareness of bodily signals arising from visceral organs, essential for the organism’s homeostatic needs. Beyond homeostasis, the integration of exteroceptive and interoceptive signals is required for the coherence of bodily self-awareness. Here we suggest that interoception also plays a critical role in s...

We often use our own emotions to understand other people’s emotions. However, emotional egocentric biases (EEB), namely the tendency to use one’s own emotional state when relating to others’ emotions may hinder this process, especially when emotions are incongruent. We capitalized on the classic EEB task to develop a new version that is easier to i...

Recent research has highlighted the contribution of interoceptive signals to different aspects of bodily self-consciousness (BSC) by means of the cardio-visual stimulation - i.e. perceiving a pulsing stimulus in synchrony with one's own heart. Here, for the first time, we investigate the effects of individual heartbeats on a critical feature of BSC...

Photojournalistic images shape our understanding of sociopolitical events. The ways in which humans are depicted in images may have far-reaching consequences for our attitudes towards them, their well-being and our sociopolitical systems. Here, we focus on the refugee crisis to understand how exposure to the dominant visual framing, which depicts r...

The Warburg Dance Movement Library is a validated set of 234 video clips of dance movements for empirical research in the fields of cognitive science and neuroscience of action perception, affect perception and neuroaesthetics. The library contains two categories of video clips of dance movement sequences. Of each pair, one version of the movement...

The Warburg Dance Movement Library is a validated set of 234 video clips of dance movements for empirical research in the fields of cognitive science and neuroscience of action perception, affect perception and neuroaesthetics. The library contains two categories of video clips of dance movement sequences. Of each pair, one version of the movement...

Modern psychology has long focused on the body as the basis of the self. Recently, predictive processing accounts of interoception (perception of the body ‘from within’) have become influential in accounting for experiences of body ownership and emotion. Here, we describe embodied selfhood in terms of ‘instrumental interoceptive inference’ that emp...

Modern psychology has long focused on the body as the basis of the self. Recently, predictive processing accounts of interoception (perception of the body 'from within') have become influential in accounting for experiences of body ownership and emotion. Here, we describe embodied selfhood in terms of 'instrumental interoceptive inference' that emp...

Several areas of the body, known as ‘erogenous zones’, are able to elicit sexual arousal in the absence of direct genital stimulation. Previous scientific investigations of these erogenous zones have been restricted to the effects of tactile stimulation of one’s own body. However, human sexual interactions are interpersonal and multimodal, involvin...

Objective People are highly attuned to fairness, with people willingly suffering personal costs to prevent others benefitting from unfair acts. Are fairness judgments influenced by group alignments? A new theory posits that we favor ingroups and denigrate members of rival outgroups when our personal identity is fused to a group. Although the mPFC h...

Interoception describes the processing and awareness of bodily signals arising from visceral organs, essential for the organism's homeostatic needs. Beyond homeostasis, the integration of exteroceptive and interoceptive signals is required for the coherence of bodily self-awareness. Here we suggest that interoception also plays a critical role in s...

Facial disfigurement can significantly affect personal identity and access to social roles. Although conventional reconstruction can have positive effects with respect to identity, these procedures are often inadequate for more severe facial defects. In these cases, facial transplantation (FT) offers patients a viable reconstructive option. However...