ArticlePDF Available

I just lost it! Fear and anger reduce the sense of agency: a study using intentional binding

Authors:

Abstract and Figures

Two recent studies have demonstrated that increases in arousal states lead to an increase people’s sense of agency, i.e., the subjective experience of controlling one’s own voluntary actions (Minohara et al. in Front Psychol 7:1165, 2016; Wen et al. in Conscious Cogn 36:87–95, 2015). We here extend these findings by showing that arousal states with negative emotional valence, such as fear and anger, decrease sense of agency. Anger and fear are negative emotional states. Anecdotally, they are often invoked as reasons for losing control, and neuroscientific evidence confirms important effects on the brain’s action control systems. Surprisingly, the subjective experience of acting in anger or fear has scarcely been investigated experimentally. Thus, the legal notion that these intense emotions may undermine normal voluntary control over actions and outcomes (the ‘Loss of Control’, a partial defence for murder) lacks any clear evidence base. In three laboratory experiments, we measured sense of agency using an implicit measure based on time perception (the “intentional binding” paradigm). These actions occurred in either an emotionally neutral condition, or in a fearful (experiments 1 and 2) or angry state (experiment 3). In line with our hypotheses, fear or anger reduced the subjective sense of control over an action outcome, even though the objective causal link between action and outcome remained the same. This gap between the objective facts of agency, and a reduced subjective experience of agency under emotional conditions, has important implications for society and law. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s00221-018-5461-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
This content is subject to copyright. Terms and conditions apply.
Vol.:(0123456789)
1 3
Experimental Brain Research (2019) 237:1205–1212
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-018-5461-6
RESEARCH ARTICLE
I just lost it! Fear andanger reduce thesense ofagency: astudy using
intentional binding
JuliaF.Christensen1· S.DiCosta1· B.Beck1,2· P.Haggard1
Received: 6 April 2018 / Accepted: 19 December 2018 / Published online: 2 March 2019
© The Author(s) 2019
Abstract
Two recent studies have demonstrated that increases in arousal states lead to an increase people’s sense of agency, i.e., the
subjective experience of controlling one’s own voluntary actions (Minohara etal. in Front Psychol 7:1165, 2016; Wen etal.
in Conscious Cogn 36:87–95, 2015). We here extend these findings by showing that arousal states with negative emotional
valence, such as fear and anger, decrease sense of agency. Anger and fear are negative emotional states. Anecdotally, they
are often invoked as reasons for losing control, and neuroscientific evidence confirms important effects on the brain’s action
control systems. Surprisingly, the subjective experience of acting in anger or fear has scarcely been investigated experimen-
tally. Thus, the legal notion that these intense emotions may undermine normal voluntary control over actions and outcomes
(the ‘Loss of Control’, a partial defence for murder) lacks any clear evidence base. In three laboratory experiments, we
measured sense of agency using an implicit measure based on time perception (the “intentional binding” paradigm). These
actions occurred in either an emotionally neutral condition, or in a fearful (experiments 1 and 2) or angry state (experiment
3). In line with our hypotheses, fear or anger reduced the subjective sense of control over an action outcome, even though
the objective causal link between action and outcome remained the same. This gap between the objective facts of agency,
and a reduced subjective experience of agency under emotional conditions, has important implications for society and law.
Keywords Sense of agency· Intentional binding· Fear· Anger· Loss of control
Introduction
‘Sense of agency’ refers to the subjective experience of con-
trolling one’s own voluntary actions, and, through them, of
causing events in the external world. [for a thorough review
of sense of agency research, please see (David etal. 2008;
Haggard 2017)]. Two recent studies have demonstrated that
unspecific arousal states (induced by colours or physical
effort) increase people’s sense of agency over their actions
(Minohara etal. 2016; Wen etal. 2015), while factors that
decrease sense of agency will tend to reduce feelings of con-
trol and responsibility (Yoshie and Haggard 2013, 2017).
Being in control of, and thereby being responsible for
one’s actions, is a key concept of criminal law. Although
fear and anger are sometimes offered as reasons for reduced
responsibility over one’s own actions, the effects of nega-
tively valenced arousal states on sense of agency remain
unclear. Extreme stress and negative emotional states influ-
ence brain mechanisms underlying action control, focussing
cognition on a single action, and limiting the consideration
of alternative responses and their outcomes (Easterbrook
1959). Thus, one might predict that induction of a nega-
tive emotional state such as fear or anger would reduce the
sense of control over one’s actions. Indeed, several studies
have shown that negative action outcomes, such as fearful
or angry human vocalisations produced by voluntary key
presses, reduce sense of agency over the committed action
(Barlas etal. 2018; Christensen etal. 2016; Gentsch etal.
2015; Takahata etal. 2012; Yoshie and Haggard 2013, 2017;
but see; Moreton etal. 2017, for contrary findings). Other
studies have demonstrated that positive emotion inductions
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this
article (https ://doi.org/10.1007/s0022 1-018-5461-6) contains
supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Julia F. Christensen
j.christensen@ucl.ac.uk
1 Institute ofCognitive Neuroscience, University College
London (UCL), Alexandra House, 17 Queen Square,
LondonWC1N3AR, UK
2 Present Address: School ofPsychology, University ofKent,
Canterbury, UK
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
1206 Experimental Brain Research (2019) 237:1205–1212
1 3
enhances sense of agency (Aarts etal. 2012), and alters
awareness of the intention to act (Rigoni etal. 2015). How-
ever, none of those studies reproduces the scenario behind a
Loss of Control legal defence, in which the key factor is the
defendant’s emotional state prior to and during the action,
rather than the emotional quality of the outcome. Rigoni
etal. (2015) found increased awareness of intention to act
when participants were in a positive emotional state, but
found no effects of negative emotional states. These authors
used a combined emotion induction procedure; participants
listened to music of different emotional valence, while they
read matching emotion-inducing sentences (positive, neutral,
negative). The authors discuss whether their lack of findings
for the negative emotion condition might be due to a weaker
emotion induction effect for negative emotions.
I just lost it!” is a common phrase in court rooms the
world over. Furthermore, Loss of Control is a partial defence
for murder in many jurisdictions. In English Law, for exam-
ple, a Defendant will not be convicted of murder if the “kill-
ing resulted from [the Defendant’s] Loss of Control” (Coro-
ners and Justice Act 2009, article 54, sect.1a), as long as a
range of conditions are met. These conditions include the
emotional state of the defendant. This paper tests whether
scientific evidence from psychological laboratory experi-
ments supports the link between emotion and action control
implied by the Loss of Control defence. The law cannot rely
only on a defendant’s subjective reports that they lost control
because of possible abuse of this defence for secondary gain
and evasion of punishment. Rather, the law must primar-
ily consider objective facts about whether the agent could
have controlled their actions, while at the same time being
aware of any possible biases in the agent’s reported subjec-
tive experience. Thus, the law must, directly or indirectly,
confront one of the major questions of cognitive neurosci-
ence of agency: how do people experience their control over
their voluntary actions? In normal circumstances, the objec-
tive physiological facts of motor action largely overlap with
subjective experience. Agents are normally aware of what
they are doing. However, research in cognitive neuroscience
of voluntary motor control has shown that the usual link
between the objective facts of control and the subjective
feeling of control over a motor action can be altered under
certain conditions. Thus, objective agency is expressed by
the fact that “Agent A does Action B”. Subjective sense
of agency is A’s feeling that they are doing/have done B
(Desantis etal. 2011; Hommel 2015; Wegner etal. 2004).
In healthy adult life, objective agency and subjective sense
of agency are well aligned: we feel a strong sense of control
over our own actions, and only over our own actions.
In cases of violent and aggressive actions, such as homi-
cides, the emotional states of fear and/or anger may feature
strongly. Both these emotions prepare the body physiologi-
cally for action. However, the phrase “I just lost it” suggests
that agents experience a reduction in subjective sense of
agency over actions committed in fearful and angry states.
Thus, strong emotions might open a gap in the normal align-
ment between the subjective experience and objective facts
of agency on which the law relies. In principle, scientific
data on both the objective controllability of action under
emotion and the subjective experience of agency should be
highly relevant to this question, but, in practice, current law
has not been informed by the evidence base of cognitive
or brain sciences. Previous studies reported reduced sense
of agency over actions that produced negative, compared
to either positive or neutral, outcomes (Barlas etal. 2018;
Christensen etal. 2016; Gentsch etal. 2015; Yoshie and
Haggard 2017). One might suggest, therefore, that negative
emotions might cause a reduction in the sense of control over
one’s own actions and their external outcomes. However,
no study has yet investigated how the subjective sense of
agency might be altered by inducing states of fear or anger.
Despite the negative valence of both fear and anger states,
there are some reasons to predict that they might have dif-
ferent effects on sense of agency. Fear depends on subcor-
tical circuits which operate preconsciously—notably the
amygdala (LeDoux 2003)—while the anger state recruits
a broader cortical network (Denson etal. 2009). Moreover,
fear and anger are associated with different action tenden-
cies; fear facilitates automatic withdrawal responses or
action inhibition (e.g., fleeing or freezing), at least as an
initial effect of fear. In contrast, anger facilitates approach
behaviours (e.g., aggression, fighting; Carver and Harmon-
Jones 2009; Davidson 1992; Frijda 1987). Here, we have
focussed on how these emotional states influence the expe-
rience of a voluntary instrumental action, rather than the
actual flight/fight behaviours with which they are associ-
ated. On this basis, we hypothesised that fear states would
abolish sense of agency over outcomes of voluntary action,
for two reasons. First, fear is associated with preconscious,
automated behavioural patterns (LeDoux 2003) and might
thus have decreasing effects on sense of agency, making vol-
untary actions feel involuntary. Second, flight responses trig-
gered by fear involve abandoning instrumental agency over
the current environment, again abandoning voluntary con-
trol, in favour of moving to a different, safer environment.
Regarding the anger state, one prediction would be that
anger states enhance sense of agency. Certainly, motivation
of goal-directed actions can be boosted by anger [though
Aarts etal. (2010) only found this effect when the outcome
was rewarding), and anger is subjectively experienced as a
hyperkinetic phenomenon (“I knew I shouldn’t have hit him,
but I was so angry…”]. On the other hand, it remains unclear
whether the basic, impulsive motor actions that are associ-
ated with the anger state indeed produce a genuine sense of
agency in the same way as reason-responsive, goal-directed
actions (“… that I suddenly found myself punching him in
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
1207Experimental Brain Research (2019) 237:1205–1212
1 3
the face”). In that case, anger states might conceivably be
associated with reduced sense of agency.
Three experiments tested these predictions. Established
laboratory models of fear (experiments 1 and 2) and anger
(experiment 3) were induced in healthy volunteers, who
made voluntary keypress ‘actions’ that caused a tone (i.e.,
the ‘outcome of the action’) 250ms later. We used this
well-known ‘intentional binding’ paradigm (Haggard etal.
2002), to obtain an implicit measure of sense of agency. This
allowed us to investigate how fear and anger states influence
sense of agency over actions.
We specifically focussed on action binding, defined as the
shift in the perceived time of an action (keypress) towards
the outcome (tone) it produces. Previous research suggests
that action binding is specific to conditions, where an action
is internally generated and executed voluntarily (Borhani
etal. 2017). Therefore, action binding provides a direct
measure of the degree to which the mental representation
of an action is linked to the action’s outcome: this laboratory
measure seems to capture the essential cognitive require-
ment of legal notions of responsibility, namely, to be aware
of and in control of one’s own actions (Fig.1).
Methods
Participants
A sample size of 20 participants per experiment was deter-
mined with GPower 3.1 (Faul etal. 2007) using the a priori
procedure for within-subject t tests (assuming a large effect
size of 0.80; alpha = 0.05; power = 0.95; Cohen 1988). In
total, 60 female right-handed volunteers (mean age = 23.53,
SD 4.01) participated in the study (time reimbursement:
£7.50/h). Ethical approval for all studies was obtained
from the UCL Research Ethics Committee (project code
4435/001), prior to commencement of any testing activi-
ties. Participants gave written informed consent before tak-
ing part in the study.
Materials andprocedure
Intentional binding paradigm
The intentional binding paradigm is a quantitative proxy
measure of sense of agency that has been extensively used.
Our procedure followed that of the previous studies (Hag-
gard etal. 2002; see also supplementary material). Briefly,
in this task, on each trial, participants are instructed to press
a key on the keyboard in front of them at a time of their
choosing, while fixating the centre of a clock displayed on
the screen with a continuously rotating clock hand. A tone
occurs at a fixed duration of 250ms after each keypress.
This brief interval between action and tone gives partici-
pants the impression of causing the tone. Participants are
then prompted to say, where the clock hand was on the clock
face in the moment they pressed the key. The experimenter
records their verbal response, and launches the next trial.
The judgement error between the reported and actual time
of action is calculated. Next, action binding is obtained by
calculating the difference in average judgement error for
actions made in a baseline block, in which no tone occurs,
and actions made in an operant condition, where the action
always elicits the tone 250ms later. Action binding serves
as an implicit marker of sense of agency.
Experiments 1 and 2 combined a fear induction proce-
dure with the intentional binding task (see “Fear induction”).
Experiment 3 combined an anger induction procedure with
the intentional binding task (see “Anger induction”). In all
three experiments, participants completed six time estima-
tion blocks of 32 trials each. Blocks 1 and 6 were baseline
blocks (i.e., no tone occurred). Blocks 2–5 were operant
blocks (i.e., a tone occurred 250ms after the participant’s
keypress).
Fear induction
The Threat of Shock paradigm was used to induce fear
(Davis etal. 2010; Robinson etal. 2013; Schmitz and Grillon
2012). In this procedure, some moderately painful shocks
are delivered early on in the experiment. This causes par-
ticipants to anticipate more shocks, even on trials, where
they actually receive no shock. Thus, interest focusses on
Fig. 1 Schematic of action binding. Action binding is a measure of
the subjective experience of the linkage between an action and its
outcome (Haggard et al. 2002). Action binding is calculated as the
difference in the perceived time of the action between the operant
condition, in which the action produces an auditory tone, and a base-
line block, in which the action does not produce any tone. The per-
ceived time of a voluntary action shifts towards the time of a subse-
quent tone in the operant condition, relative to the baseline
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
1208 Experimental Brain Research (2019) 237:1205–1212
1 3
how participants’ expectation, or fear, of subsequent shocks
alters cognition—in our case, sense of agency.
To deliver the painful stimulation, a Digitimer DS7A
constant current stimulator was used. Two electrodes were
placed on the back of the participants’ left hand, since they
were using the right hand for the keypress (all participants
were right-handed). For the pain calibration, prior to experi-
ments 1 and 2, each participant’s individual pain threshold
was determined using a stepwise approximation procedure,
increasing the stimulation in small steps of 1mA, until the
shocks were “painful but definitely bearable” (see supple-
mentary materials for further details).
Our participants performed 4 operant blocks of which
2 blocks were “threat” blocks (the word “threat” was dis-
played on the screen) and participants were informed they
could receive a shock at any time. The other 2 blocks were
“safe” blocks (the word “safe” was displayed on the screen)
and participants were informed that they would receive no
painful shocks. Threat and Safe blocks were alternated, and
the starting block was counterbalanced (experiment 1), or
interleaved in a fixed order (threat–safe–threat–safe; experi-
ment 2). In experiment 1, the electric shocks occurred simul-
taneously with the keypress. In experiment 2, they occurred
at the time of the subsequent tone. This latter arrangement
controls for potential effects of prior entry (subjective expe-
rience of salient events occurring earlier in time; Spence
and Parise 2010).
Our implementation of this paradigm follows the pro-
cedure as detailed below and is explained further in
the supplementary material. Participants in the “fear”
action binding paradigm were informed that occasional
randomly-interleaved shocks to their hand might occur in
some blocks of the experiment. For this, blocks of trials
in the intentional binding task were labelled on-screen as
“threat” or “safe”. Participants were informed that they
might receive a painful shock at any time in “threat” blocks.
Five painful shocks were given on random trials early in
“threat” blocks. Expectation (or fear) of painful shock in
threat blocks was hypothesised to influence action binding.
In “safe” blocks, participants were informed they would
not receive any painful shocks, and accordingly, no painful
shocks were given (experiment 1), or five early non-painful
shocks at detection threshold were given (experiment 2, see
supplementary methods for justification). Participants also
performed 2 baseline blocks, one before and one after the 4
operant blocks. Shock trials were discarded, and action bind-
ing was analysed for trials without shocks (Fig.2).
Anger induction
In experiment 3, we used a frustration paradigm called
the “Impossible Task” which is a common procedure for
inducing anger or frustration (Buss 1961; Taylor 1967).
The rationale behind this paradigm is that the participant is
assigned a task, but successful performance on the assign-
ment is never possible, no matter how hard the participant
tries. This task has been used to provoke anger states, since
the participant acts in expectation of a reward, but never
obtains it (Blair 2012).
For the present experiment, participants were informed
that in addition to the Clock estimation task, a reaction time
(RT) task would be embedded in the 4 operant blocks. Our
Fig. 2 A Illustration of fear induction procedure. Threat and Safe
blocks were alternated, and the starting block was counterbalanced
(experiment 1), or interleaved in a fixed order, always A–B–A–B
(threat–safe–threat–safe; experiment 2). B Illustration of anger induc-
tion procedure. The operant blocks were interleaved in a fixed order,
always A–B–A–B (learn–test–learn–test; experiment 3). In all three
experiments, participants performed 2 baseline blocks, one before
and one after the 4 operant blocks. See text and supplementary mate-
rial for full details
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
1209Experimental Brain Research (2019) 237:1205–1212
1 3
implementation of this paradigm follows the procedure as
detailed below and is explained further in the supplemen-
tary material. Participants were instructed that whenever the
screen background colour would change, they should press
F1 as quickly as possible using their right hand, reaching
across the body midline horizontally. They were told that
in 2 “learning” blocks they would receive feedback on their
performance. They were promised a reward of £2.50 in addi-
tion to their final pay if they were fast enough in the RT
trials. If they heard a “beep” sound, that would mean that
they had been fast enough. If they heard a “buzz” sound,
that would mean they had not been fast enough, and they
had lost 25p of the £2.50. In fact, the program was set such
that the outcome tone was always a buzz. Thus, feedback
was misleading, and frustrating for participants, and the
“learning” blocks in fact aimed to induce anger. In the 2
remaining operant blocks, the “test” blocks (control condi-
tion), participants were informed that they could ‘practice
the task’ without affecting their potential reward bonus.
They were told that their RT would be monitored as in the
learning blocks and that they were to perform as the task as
quickly as possible, just as they had learned in the “learning”
blocks. Learning and test blocks were interleaved, in a fixed
order, starting with a learning block. Probe reaching trials
were discarded, and only action binding trials were analysed.
Again, participants performed 2 baseline blocks in which
they made judgements of actions in the absence of tones.
The baseline blocks occurred both before and one after the
4 operant blocks (Table1).
Results
Manipulation checks showed that participants indeed expe-
rienced the emotional states targeted. In the post-session
questionnaire of the fear experiment (experiment 2) partici-
pants reported to have been fearful during the threat blocks
(m = 0.8, SD 1.77; range − 3 to + 3), and not fearful in the
safe blocks (m = 2.85; SD 0.49; range − 1 to − 3); (t = 2.09,
df = 19, p < 0.001). Likewise, in the anger experiment
(experiment 3), participants reported to have been angry/
frustrated during the anger blocks (m = 0.8, SD 1.61; range
3 to + 3) and less angry in the control blocks (m = 0.1;
SD 1.65; range − 3 to + 3); (t = 2.09, df = 19, p = 0.006). See
supplementary materials for details. Shock trials (experi-
ments 1 and 2) and probe reaching trials (experiment 3) were
discarded, and only action binding trials were analysed.
Main analysis
For both experiments 1 and 2, separate 2 × 2 repeated meas-
ures (RM) ANOVAs were conducted with the factors Occur-
rence (1st time, 2nd time, to control for order effects) and
State (Fear, Neutral). In experiment 1, ANOVA revealed a
significant main effect of State (F(1,19) = 4.414, p = 0.049,
𝜂2
p
= 0.189 90% confidence intervals [CI] for
𝜂2
p
= [0.0004,
0.4089]). No other main effects or interactions were signifi-
cant (Occurrence: F(1,19) = 0.353, p = 0.559,
𝜂2
p
= 0.018;
Occurrence × State: F(1,19) = 0.619, p = 0.441,
𝜂2
p
= 0.032).
Table 1 Stimulus parameters,
descriptive measures and post-
session questionnaires for the
three experiments
Threshold values refer to level of electrical stimulation just detectable, or just experienced as painful. Inten-
sity rating is a subjective estimate of pain level at threshold. Number of shocks/probes: participant’s post-
session estimate of number of shocks received in experiments 1 and 2, or of number of probe reaching
trials in experiment 3
Fear Anger
Experiment 1 Experiment 2 Experiment 3
Mean SD Mean SD Mean SD
Age 25.2 4.67 21.95 3.33 23.45 3.39
Detection threshold (µv) 25 5.13 20.75 4.17 NA NA
Pain threshold (µv) 225.75 118.15 178.25 88.20 NA NA
Intensity rating 7.35 0.99 6.1 2.21 NA NA
Estimated number of shocks/
probes (fear/anger blocks)
10.25 3.20 10.2 3.41 7.6 2.30
Estimated number shocks/probes
(neutral blocks)
NA NA 5.6 4.84 6.4 2.35
How scared? 1.15 1.35 0.8 1.77 − 2.1 1.21
How angry? − 2.15 1.18 − 1.05 1.23 0.8 1.61
BAS drive 12.7 2.23 9.05 2.14 11.4 1.75
BAS fun seeking 12.9 1.97 8.6 2.28 12.32 1.60
BAS reward responsiveness 18.1 1.23 7.05 1.82 18.25 1.29
BIS 20.85 4.43 13.85 2.39 22.05 2.84
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
1210 Experimental Brain Research (2019) 237:1205–1212
1 3
In experiment 2 there was a trend of State (F(1,19) = 3.836,
p = 0.065,
𝜂2
p
= 0.168, 90% CI [0.0000, 0.3893]), in the same
direction as experiment 1. Participants showed less action
binding in a fear state. No other main effects or interactions
were significant (Occurrence: F(1,19) = 0.310, p = 0.584,
𝜂2
p
= 0.016; Occurrence × State: F(1,19) = 1.308, p = 0.267,
𝜂2
p
= 0.064).
For experiment 3, a 2 × 2 repeated measures (RM)
ANOVA was conducted with the factors Occurrence (1st
time, 2nd time) and State (Anger, Neutral). ANOVA
revealed a significant main effect of State (F(1,19) = 4.847,
p = 0.040,
𝜂2
p
= 0.203, 90% CI = [0.0051, 0.4226]). Partici-
pants showed reduced action binding when angry. No other
main effects or interactions were significant (Occurrence:
F(1,19) = 0.385, p = 0.542,
𝜂2
p
= 0.020; Occurrence × State:
F(1,19) = 1.860, p = 0.189,
𝜂2
p
= 0.089). See supplementary
material for additional details (Fig.3).
Discussion
We found that both fear and anger inductions reduced our
chosen implicit measure of sense of agency, namely inten-
tional binding, or the perceptual attraction of a voluntary
action towards its outcome. The prepotent action tendency
in response to a fearful event is withdrawal, while for anger,
it is approach (Carver and Harmon-Jones 2009; Davidson
1992; Frijda 1987; LeDoux 2003). However, these contrast-
ing polarities of emotional modulation for fear and anger
were not seen for our subjective sense of agency measure:
both states resulted in a reduction of participants’ sense of
agency.
Our result extends previous work in two important ways.
First, our effect was found for action binding, while previous
studies found valence effects primarily for outcome bind-
ing (Gentsch etal. 2015; Takahata etal. 2012; Yoshie and
Haggard 2013, 2017). Action binding is potentially a more
informative measure of action-outcome association than
outcome binding: it is independent of the physical charac-
teristics of the outcome event, while outcome binding is not
(Wolpe and Rowe 2014). Second, we studied how an emo-
tional state influenced sense of agency, rather than percep-
tion of events that were themselves emotionally significant.
Again, this makes it unlikely that our time estimation results
merely reflect specific features of our stimuli.
Fear and anger are both negative emotions, and both
reduced our implicit measure of sense of agency. In that
sense, we replicate previous findings of a reduced sense of
agency in the presence of negative, compared to positive,
emotion (Yoshie and Haggard 2013). Importantly, however,
the negative emotion in our study was not linked to any
specific event on those trials analysed for binding. Rather,
negative emotion was linked to the participant’s emotional
state at the time of acting. In both cases, the impact of nega-
tive emotion was a reduction in sense of agency. This could
be interpreted as a psychological distancing from action
outcomes.
Our study focussed on just two specific emotions that have
been classically associated with loss of control, and poten-
tially with reduced responsibility. Moreover, we found that
both these emotions had comparable effects on our measure
of sense of agency. Therefore, one might ask whether modu-
lations of sense of agency are specific for particular emo-
tions at all, or might alternatively reflect non-specific fac-
tors accompanying these emotions, such as general arousal.
Many psychological studies distinguish emotional valence
from arousal by demonstrating opposite directions for effects
of positive and negative emotions. In contrast, arousal is
generally assumed to be unipolar: both positive and negative
emotions are thought to increase arousal (Lang and Brad-
ley 2010; Lang etal. 2008). We found that two negative
emotions both had effects in the same direction on sense of
agency. Thus, arousal interpretations cannot be entirely ruled
out. Nevertheless, we think that non-specific arousal cannot
explain all emotional modulations of sense of agency for
several reasons. First, the best-established effect of arousal
on time perception is a speeding up of an ‘internal clock’,
probably mediated by transient fluctuations in dopamine (for
a review, see Droit-Volet and Meck 2007). However, those
studies were based on changes in duration perception, rather
Fig. 3 Action binding in emotionally neutral control blocks, and
in conditions inducing fear or anger. Error bars represent SEM.
*p < 0.05, ƚ = 0.065
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
1211Experimental Brain Research (2019) 237:1205–1212
1 3
than the cross-modal event perception studied here. Consist-
ent shifts in perception of a single event, such as our action
binding measure, are not easily explained by mere changes
in arousal (Droit-Volet and Meck 2007). Second, authors
of previous experimental studies have suggested that emo-
tional stimuli that are equally arousing could have opposite
effects on sense of agency, with the direction of the effect
depending on their negative vs positive valence. In studies
of financial wins and losses, or emotional sounds as action
outcomes, negative outcomes reduced intentional binding
relative to neutral outcomes. Yet enhancing effects of posi-
tive outcomes on intentional binding were small or absent,
relative to neutral outcomes (Gentsch and Synofzik 2014;
Takahata etal. 2012; Yoshie and Haggard 2013). Since par-
ticipants in those studies rated positive and negative stimuli
as equally arousing, arousal cannot readily explain such
valence-dependent effects. Finally, two studies that specifi-
cally aimed to investigate effects of unspecific arousal on
sense of agency both showed stronger sense of agency under
high arousal conditions (Minohara etal. 2016; Wen etal.
2015)—opposite to the effects of fear and anger states that
we found here (high arousal states of negative valence).
Our result should not be overinterpreted, either scientifi-
cally or normatively. Importantly, a reduced sense of agency
does not imply that participants had no sense of agency, nor
that they acted involuntarily. We assume that our participants
retained full awareness of their actions and outcomes, and
that their keypress actions were mediated by cortical volun-
tary motor systems throughout. Our findings merely sug-
gest that they experienced less linkage between action and
outcome under strong emotion. On the normative side, the
fact that sense of agency is reduced by negative emotional
states does not demonstrate total lack of responsibility, nor
condone any specific action. Feeling less responsible does
not necessarily make one actually less responsible (see sup-
plementary material for a focussed discussion of relevance
of our results to legal concepts of responsibility). For exam-
ple, the law might reasonably require individuals to man-
age situations of high emotion so as to avoid irresponsible
actions. Our surprising finding of anger-induced reduction
in sense of agency may be particularly relevant in the con-
text of anger management. The combination of increased
drive to act, together with a reduced sense of control over
one’s action, will be familiar to anyone who has spoken, or
received, an unkind word in anger. Society normally expects
healthy adults to manage anger through a process of self-
control, and many social institutions carefully teach such
self-control. For example, anger management techniques
teach individuals to “walk away before you lose it” (Gra-
ham 1998; Grave and Blissett 2004; Kendall 2000; NHS
Choices 2015).
Acknowledgements This work was supported by AHRC Science in
Culture grant to PH (Award number: 162746). P.H. was additionally
supported by an ESRC Professorial Fellowship, and by ERC Advanced
Grant (HUMVOL grant agreement number 323943). We are grateful
to Dr. Oliver J. Robinson for assistance with the Threat of Shock Para-
digm, and to Professor Lisa Claydon and Dr. Caroline Roediger for
valuable discussions and comments on legal concepts of responsibility.
Author contributions JFC and PH designed the experiments, JFC, PH,
and BB set up the experiment. JFC performed the data collection; JFC,
PH and SDC performed the data analyses. JFC and PH drafted the man-
uscript and BB and SDC provided critical revisions of versions of the
manuscript. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript.
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Crea-
tive Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creat iveco
mmons .org/licen ses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribu-
tion, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate
credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the
Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
References
Aarts H, Ruys KI, Veling H, Renes RA, de Groot JH, van Nunen AM,
Geertjes S (2010) The art of anger: reward context turns avoid-
ance responses to anger-related objects into approach. Psychol Sci
21(10):1406–1410. https ://doi.org/10.1177/09567 97610 38415 2
Aarts H, Bikleveld E, Custers R, Dogge M, Deelder M, Schutter
D, Haren NE (2012) Positive priming and intentional bind-
ing: eye-blink rate predicts reward information effects on
the sense of agency. Soc Neurosci 7(1):105–112. https ://doi.
org/10.1080/17470 919.2011.59060 2
Barlas Z, Hockley WE, Obhi SS (2018) Effects of free choice and
outcome valence on the sense of agency: evidence from meas-
ures of intentional binding and feelings of control. Exp Brain Res
236(1):129–139
Blair RJR (2012) Considering anger from a cognitive neuroscience
perspective. Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci 3(1):65–74. https ://
doi.org/10.1002/wcs.154
Borhani K, Beck B, Haggard P (2017) Choosing, doing, and control-
ling: implicit sense of agency over somatosensory events. Psychol
Sci 28(7):882–893. https ://doi.org/10.1177/09567 97617 69769 3
Buss A (1961) Investigating aggression in the laboratory. The psychol-
ogy of aggression. Wiley, Hoboken
Carver CS, Harmon-Jones E (2009) Anger is an approach-related
affect: evidence and implications. Psychol Bull 135(2):183–204.
https ://doi.org/10.1037/a0013 965
Christensen JF, Yoshie M, Di Costa S, Haggard P (2016) Emotional
valence, sense of agency and responsibility: a study using inten-
tional binding. Conscious Cogn 43:1–10
Cohen J (1988) Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences,
2ndedn. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc., Hillsdale
Coroners and Justice Act (2009) article 54. https ://www.legis latio n.go v.
uk/ukpga /2009/25/secti on/55
David N, Newen A, Vogeley K (2008) The “sense of agency” and its
underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms. Conscious Cogn
17(2):523–534
Davidson RJ (1992) Prolegomenon to the structure of emotion: glean-
ings from neuropsychology. Cogn Emot 6(3–4):245–268. https ://
doi.org/10.1080/02699 93920 84110 71
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
1212 Experimental Brain Research (2019) 237:1205–1212
1 3
Davis M, Walker DL, Miles L, Grillon C (2010) Phasic vs sustained
fear in rats and humans: role of the extended amygdala in fear vs
anxiety. Neuropsychopharmacology 35:105–135
Denson TF, Pedersen WC, Ronquillo J, Nandy AS (2009) The angry
brain: neural correlates of anger, angry rumination, and aggressive
personality. J Cogn Neurosci 21:734–744
Desantis A, Roussel C, Waszak F (2011) On the influence of causal
beliefs on the feeling of agency. Conscious Cogn 33:1–10. https
://doi.org/10.1016/j.conco g.2011.02.012
Droit-Volet S, Meck WH (2007) How emotions colour our percep-
tion of time. Trends Cogn Sci 11(12):504–513. https ://doi.
org/10.1016/j.tics.2007.09.008
Easterbrook JA (1959) The effect of emotion on cue utilization and the
organization of behaviour. Psychol Rev 66(3):183–201
Faul F, Erdfelder E, Lang A-G, Buchner A (2007) G*Power 3: a flex-
ible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral,
and biomedical sciences. Behav Res Methods 39:175–191
Frijda NH (1987) Emotion, cognitive structure, and action tendency.
Cogn Emot 1(2):115–143. https ://doi.org/10.1080/02699 93870
84080 43
Gentsch A, Synofzik M (2014) Affective coding: the emotional
dimension of agency. Front Hum Neurosci 12(8):608. https ://doi.
org/10.3389/fnhum .2014.00608
Gentsch A, Weiss C, Spengler S, Synofzik M, Schütz-Bosbach S
(2015) Doing good or bad: how interactions between action and
emotion expectations shape the sense of agency. Soc Neurosci
10(4):418–430. https ://doi.org/10.1080/17470 919.2015.10063 74
Graham P (1998) Cognitive behaviour therapy for children and fami-
lies. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Grave J, Blissett J (2004) Is cognitive behaviour therapy developmen-
tally appropriate for young children? Review of the evidence. Clin
Psychol Rev 24:399–420
Haggard P (2017) Sense of agency in the human brain. Nat Rev Neu-
rosci 18:196–207
Haggard P, Clark S, Kalogeras J (2002) Voluntary action and conscious
awareness. Nat Neurosci 11:3656–3666
Hommel B (2015) Action control and the sense of agency. In: Haggard
P, Eitam B (eds) The sense of agency. Oxford University Press,
Oxford, pp307–326
Kendall PC (2000) Child and adolescent therapy: cognitive behavioural
therapy procedures. The Guilford Press, New York
Lang PJ, Bradley MM (2010) Emotion and the motivational brain.
Biol Psychol 84(3):437–450. https ://doi.org/10.1016/j.biops
ycho.2009.10.007
Lang PJ, Bradley MM, Cuthbert BN (2008) International affective pic-
ture system (IAPS): affective ratings of pictures and instruction
manual. University of Florida, Gainesville
LeDoux J (2003) The emotional brain, fear and the amygdala. Cell
Mol Neurobiol 23:4/5
Minohara R, Wen W, Hamasaki S, Maeda T, Kato M, Yamakawa H
etal (2016) Strength of intentional effort enhances the sense
of agency. Front Psychol 7:1165. https ://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg
.2016.01165
Moreton J, Callan MJ, Hughes G (2017) How much does emotional
valence of action outcomes affect temporal binding? Conscious
Cogn 49:25–34
NHS Choices (2015) http://www.nhs.uk/Condi tions /stres s-anxie ty-
depre ssion /Pages /contr ollin g-anger .aspx. Retrieved 16 Oct 2015
Rigoni D, Daemanet J, Sartori G (2015) Happiness in action: the
impact of positive affect on the time of the conscious intention to
act. Front Psychol 6:1307
Robinson OJ, Vytal K, Cornwell BR, Grillon C (2013) The impact of
anxiety upon cognition: perspectives from human threat of shock
studies. Front Hum Neurosci 7:203
Schmitz A, Grillon C (2012) Assessing fear and anxiety in humans
using the threat of predictable and unpredictable aversive events
(the NPU-threat test). Nat Protoc 7:527–532
Spence C, Parise C (2010) Prior-entry: a review. Conscious Cogn
19(1):364–379
Takahata K, Takahashi H, Maeda T, Umeda S, Suhara T, Mimura
M, Kato M (2012) It’s not my fault: postdictive modulation of
intentional binding by monetary gains and losses. PLoS One.
7(12):e53421
Taylor SP (1967) Aggressive behavior and physiological arousal as a
function of provocation and the tendency to inhibit aggression.
J Pers 35:297–310. https ://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1967.
tb014 30.x
Wegner DM, Sparrow B, Winerman L (2004) Vicarious agency: expe-
riencing control over the movements of others. J Pers Soc Psychol
86:838–848. https ://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.86.6.83
Wen W, Yamashita A, Asama H (2015) The influence of action-
outcome delay and arousal on sense of agency and the inten-
tional binding effect. Conscious Cogn 36:87–95. https ://doi.
org/10.1016/j.conco g.2015.06.004
Wolpe N, Rowe JB (2014) Beyond the “urge to move”: objective meas-
ures for the study of agency in the post-Libet era. Front Hum
Neurosci 8:450
Yoshie M, Haggard P (2013) Negative emotional outcomes attenuate
sense of agency over voluntary actions. Curr Biol 23(20):2028–
2032. https ://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.08.034
Yoshie M, Haggard P (2017) Effects of emotional valence on sense of
agency require a predictive model. Sci Rep 7(1):8733. https ://doi.
org/10.1038/s4159 8-017-08803 -3
Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to
jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Terms and Conditions
Springer Nature journal content, brought to you courtesy of Springer Nature Customer Service Center GmbH (“Springer Nature”).
Springer Nature supports a reasonable amount of sharing of research papers by authors, subscribers and authorised users (“Users”), for small-
scale personal, non-commercial use provided that all copyright, trade and service marks and other proprietary notices are maintained. By
accessing, sharing, receiving or otherwise using the Springer Nature journal content you agree to these terms of use (“Terms”). For these
purposes, Springer Nature considers academic use (by researchers and students) to be non-commercial.
These Terms are supplementary and will apply in addition to any applicable website terms and conditions, a relevant site licence or a personal
subscription. These Terms will prevail over any conflict or ambiguity with regards to the relevant terms, a site licence or a personal subscription
(to the extent of the conflict or ambiguity only). For Creative Commons-licensed articles, the terms of the Creative Commons license used will
apply.
We collect and use personal data to provide access to the Springer Nature journal content. We may also use these personal data internally within
ResearchGate and Springer Nature and as agreed share it, in an anonymised way, for purposes of tracking, analysis and reporting. We will not
otherwise disclose your personal data outside the ResearchGate or the Springer Nature group of companies unless we have your permission as
detailed in the Privacy Policy.
While Users may use the Springer Nature journal content for small scale, personal non-commercial use, it is important to note that Users may
not:
use such content for the purpose of providing other users with access on a regular or large scale basis or as a means to circumvent access
control;
use such content where to do so would be considered a criminal or statutory offence in any jurisdiction, or gives rise to civil liability, or is
otherwise unlawful;
falsely or misleadingly imply or suggest endorsement, approval , sponsorship, or association unless explicitly agreed to by Springer Nature in
writing;
use bots or other automated methods to access the content or redirect messages
override any security feature or exclusionary protocol; or
share the content in order to create substitute for Springer Nature products or services or a systematic database of Springer Nature journal
content.
In line with the restriction against commercial use, Springer Nature does not permit the creation of a product or service that creates revenue,
royalties, rent or income from our content or its inclusion as part of a paid for service or for other commercial gain. Springer Nature journal
content cannot be used for inter-library loans and librarians may not upload Springer Nature journal content on a large scale into their, or any
other, institutional repository.
These terms of use are reviewed regularly and may be amended at any time. Springer Nature is not obligated to publish any information or
content on this website and may remove it or features or functionality at our sole discretion, at any time with or without notice. Springer Nature
may revoke this licence to you at any time and remove access to any copies of the Springer Nature journal content which have been saved.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, Springer Nature makes no warranties, representations or guarantees to Users, either express or implied
with respect to the Springer nature journal content and all parties disclaim and waive any implied warranties or warranties imposed by law,
including merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose.
Please note that these rights do not automatically extend to content, data or other material published by Springer Nature that may be licensed
from third parties.
If you would like to use or distribute our Springer Nature journal content to a wider audience or on a regular basis or in any other manner not
expressly permitted by these Terms, please contact Springer Nature at
onlineservice@springernature.com

Supplementary resource (1)

... Numerous studies have shown that time appears compressed in situations in which the person is active, while time appears stretched in situations in which the person is passive [e.g. [20][21][22][23][24][25], suggesting it represents a proxy of the sense of agency. Explicit measurements also exist, and are usually obtained through a direct report of how people attribute the consequences of their own actions or how in control they feel 26 , but these measurements are sensitive to social desirability and other biases [e.g. ...
Article
Full-text available
There is a growing interest in understanding the effects of human-machine interaction on moral decision-making (Moral-DM) and sense of agency (SoA). Here, we investigated whether the “moral behavior” of an AI may affect both moral-DM and SoA in a military population, by using a task in which cadets played the role of drone operators on a battlefield. Participants had to decide whether or not to initiate an attack based on the presence of enemies and the risk of collateral damage. By combining three different types of trials (Moral vs. two No-Morals) in three blocks with three type of intelligent system support (No-AI support vs. Aggressive-AI vs. Conservative-AI), we showed that participants’ decisions in the morally challenging situations were influenced by the inputs provided by the autonomous system. Furthermore, by measuring implicit and explicit agency, we found a significant increase in the SoA at the implicit level in the morally challenging situations, and a decrease in the explicit responsibility during the interaction with both AIs. These results suggest that the AI behavior influences human moral decision-making and alters the sense of agency and responsibility in ethical scenarios. These findings have implications for the design of AI-assisted decision-making processes in moral contexts.
... This speculation is supported by the currently emerging debate about the mechanisms underlying temporal binding. While it was previously assumed that this measure reflects a perception bias stemming from an implicit sense of agency for observed events (e.g., Beck et al., 2017;Borhani et al., 2017;Christensen et al., 2019;Haggard et al., 2002;Obhi & Hall, 2011), doubts about this interpretation arose during the past years (e.g., Kirsch et al., 2019;Schwarz et al., 2019;Siebertz & Jansen, 2022;Thanopoulos et al., 2018;Tonn et al., 2021). While alternative underlying mechanisms like multisensory integration have been suggested, they are still under debate (Gutzeit et al., 2023;Hon, 2023;Klaffehn et al., 2021Klaffehn et al., , 2024Lush et al., 2019;Schwarz & Weller, 2023;Tanaka, 2024). ...
Article
Full-text available
It is an open question how prevented events are represented in the human cognitive system—are they represented like produced events or are they represented in a different format? Here, we propose that seemingly contradictory observations on this question can be unified by assuming different time courses for production and prevention actions. Evidence from two experiments in the anticipatory saccades paradigm supported this model. Specifically, our results suggest that prevented events might be represented like produced events during action selection and execution, whereas their representation dissolves rapidly during action monitoring. In other words, the representation of prevented events reflects a two-step process: An initial affirmative representation is followed by later negation. Preregistrations, data, and analysis scripts for all experiments are available online (https://osf.io/m3veh/). Supplementary information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13414-025-03019-4.
... A widely used implicit measure is intentional binding (Moore and Obhi, 2012), in which participants perceive movements and their effects to be closer together in time when they are under voluntary control. This effect has been widely replicated (Moore et al., , 2010Antusch et al., 2021;Engbert et al., 2008;Haggard et al., 2002) and is considered to be an indirect measure of SoA (Coyle et al., 2012;Winkler et al., 2020;Christensen et al., 2019;Wen et al., 2015). Explicit and implicit measures do not always coincide (Dewey and Knoblich, 2014), which is believed to reflect a difference in the level of awareness. ...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction: Gesture-based interactions provide control over a system without the need for physical contact. Mid-air haptic technology allows a user to not visually engage with the interface while receiving system information and is readily manipulable, which has positive implications for automotive environments. It is important, however, that the user still feels a sense of agency, which here refers to perceiving system changes as caused by their gesture. Methods: In the current study, 36 participants engaged in an experimental time perception task with an automotive-themed infotainment menu, serving as an implicit quantitative measure of agency. This was supplemented with additional self-reported measures. They selected different icons via gesture poses, with sensory feedback either visually or haptically. In addition, (sensory) feedback was also the same for each icon, arbitrarily different or carried semantic information. Results: Mid-air haptics increased agency compared to visual, and this did not vary as a function of feedback meaning. Agency was also associated with general measures of trust and usability. Discussion: Our findings demonstrate positive implications for mid-air haptics in automotive contexts and highlight the general importance of user agency.
... In the aforementioned study on the effects of fear on participants' sense of agency, also a lab analog of "anger" was induced in a different group of participants (using an "impossible task"-frustration paradigm; Buss, 1961;Taylor, 1967). Similar to the fear condition explained above, as compared to a neutral condition, participants' subjective sense of control over their own actions was again reduced when angry (Christensen et al., 2019;exp. 3). ...
Article
Full-text available
The law assumes that healthy adults are generally responsible for their actions and have the ability to control their behavior based on rational and moral principles. This contrasts with some recent neuroscientific accounts of action control. Nevertheless, both law and neuroscience acknowledge that strong emotions including fear and anger may “trigger” loss of normal voluntary control over action. Thus, “Loss of Control” is a partial defense for murder under English law, paralleling similar defenses in other legal systems. Here we consider the neuroscientific evidence for such legal classifications of responsibility, particularly focussing on how emotional states modulate voluntary motor control and sense of agency. First, we investigate whether neuroscience could contribute an evidence-base for law in this area. Second, we consider the societal impact of some areas where legal thinking regarding responsibility for action diverges from neuroscientific evidence: should we be guided by normative legal traditions, or by modern understanding of brain functions? In addressing these objectives, we propose a translation exercise between neuroscientific and legal terms, which may assist future interdisciplinary research.
... The IB refers to the subjective compression of the interval between an action and its outcome observed in active, but not passive, movement: participants are asked to estimate the time interval between an action they perform and its consequences [57][58][59]. A series of previous studies have shown that the time estimation between action and outcome is a valid implicit, quantitative measure of SoA [60][61][62] and is preferable to a subjective measurement of responsibility, which is subject to social desirability and other biases, such as the self-serving bias (e.g., Blackwood et al., [63,64]. This finding implies that a commander might be a suitable candidate to be held responsible, as the engagement and sense of agency remain intact despite the involvement of autonomous systems [50]. ...
Article
Full-text available
Artificial intelligence (AI) has found extensive applications to varying degrees across diverse domains, including the possibility of using it within military contexts for making decisions that can have moral consequences. A recurring challenge in this area concerns the allocation of moral responsibility in the case of negative AI-induced outcomes. Some scholars posit the existence of an insurmountable “responsibility gap”, wherein neither the AI system nor the human agents involved can or should be held responsible. Conversely, other scholars dispute the presence of such gaps or propose potential solutions. One solution that frequently emerges in the literature on AI ethics is the concept of command responsibility, wherein human agents may be held responsible because they perform a supervisory role over the (subordinate) AI. In the article we examine the compatibility of command responsibility in light of recent empirical studies and psychological evidence, aiming to anchor discussions in empirical realities rather than relying exclusively on normative arguments. Our argument can be succinctly summarized as follows: (1) while the theoretical foundation of command responsibility appears robust (2) its practical implementation raises significant concerns, (3) yet these concerns alone should not entirely preclude its application (4) they underscore the importance of considering and integrating empirical evidence into ethical discussions.
Article
Background Patients with refractory conditions often identify themselves with their illness, which affects multiple aspects of their lives. The pictorial representation of illness and self measure (PRISM) is a tool used to assess the enmeshment of individuals’ perception of self with a particular medical condition, broadly termed self-condition enmeshment. Aims This study aimed to evaluate changes in PRISM scores and how these changes relate to symptom changes following naturalistic psychedelic use. Methods In this survey, we retrospectively assessed changes in PRISM scores in 297 individuals who self-engaged in naturalistic psychedelic use for therapeutic purposes. Participants also completed the Patient Global Impression of Change (PGIC) scale to report symptom changes resulting from their perceived most salient psychedelic experience (MSPE). Results PGIC scores indicated that the majority of participants with depression (95.4%), posttraumatic stress disorder (98.36%), and anxiety (94.87%) reported symptom improvement following naturalistic psychedelic use. There was a significant decrease ( p = 4.65 × 10 ⁻²⁵ ) in PRISM scores after MSPE compared to their PRISM scores before MSPE, indicating that individuals experienced a reduced identification of their identity with their condition following psychedelic use. PRISM change scores were also correlated with PGIC scores across all conditions (ρ = 0.41, p = 1.64 × 10 ⁻¹¹ ), indicating that reductions in self-condition enmeshment were associated with symptom improvement. Conclusions Our results suggest that PRISM has transdiagnostic sensitivity for investigating the effects of psychedelics on self-perception. Interpretation is limited by convenience sampling, potential positive bias, retrospective reporting, and unclear doses and settings with natural psychedelic use.
Article
Full-text available
Concern about personal finances is one of the most widespread and salient sources of stress. We advance our emerging understanding of the work-related impacts of financial stress by examining the consequences of personal financial stress on leadership behavior. Drawing on compensatory control theory, we propose that financial stress positively relates to abusive supervision via a lowered sense of personal control. Integrating social role theory, we propose that these effects are stronger for leaders who are men than leaders who are women. We test our model in a vignette-based study using a sample of leaders (N = 201) and a second multiwave, multisource field survey study among leaders and their subordinates (N = 119 leader–subordinate dyads). Across both studies, we found that financial stress was positively associated with abusive supervision via lack of control and that this relationship was stronger for men than women. In Study 2, we examined an alternative tend-and-befriend theoretical account, proposing that leaders who are women exhibit more communion-striving motivation and empathic leadership as a result of financial stress. We found some support for this alternative pathway, though not gender differences in it, and in doing so we uncovered novel outcomes of financial stress. Our results offer implications for supporting employee financial health and uncover a context wherein men (and their subordinates), rather than women, experience the costs of misalignment with societal gender expectations.
Article
Full-text available
The sense of agency varies as a function of arousal in negative emotional contexts. As yet, it is unknown whether the same is true for positive affect, and how inter-individual characteristics might predict these effects. Temporal binding, an implicit measure of the sense of agency, was measured in 59 participants before and after watching either an emotionally neutral film clip or a positive film clip with high or low arousal. Analyses included participants’ individual differences in subjective affective ratings, physiological arousal (pupillometry, skin conductance, heart rate), striatal dopamine levels via eye blink rates, and psychopathy. Linear mixed models showed that sexual arousal decreased temporal binding whereas calm pleasure had no facilitation effect on binding. Striatal dopamine levels were positively linked whereas subjective and physiological arousal may be negatively associated with binding towards actions. Psychopathic traits reduced the effect of high arousal on binding towards actions. These results provide evidence that individual differences influence the extent to which the temporal binding is affected by high arousing states with positive valence.
Article
Full-text available
Everyday actions can be characterized by whether they are freely chosen or commanded by external stimuli, and whether they produce pleasant or unpleasant outcomes. To assess how these aspects of actions affect the sense of agency, we asked participants to perform freely selected or instructed key presses which could produce pleasant or unpleasant chords. We obtained estimates of the key press–chord intervals and ratings of the feeling of control (FoC) over the outcomes. Interval estimates were used to assess intentional binding—the perceived temporal attraction between actions and their outcomes. Results showed stronger binding and higher FoC ratings in the free compared to instructed condition. Additionally, FoC was stronger for pleasant compared to unpleasant outcomes, and for pleasant outcomes that were produced by freely selected compared to instructed actions. These results highlight the importance of free choice and outcome valence on the SoA. They also reveal how freedom of action selection and pleasantness of action-outcomes can interact to affect the FoC.
Article
Full-text available
Sense of agency (SoA), a feeling that one’s voluntary actions produce events in the external world, is a key factor behind every goal-directed human behaviour. Recent studies have demonstrated that SoA is reduced when one’s voluntary action causes negative outcomes, compared to when it causes positive outcomes. It is yet unclear whether this emotional modulation of SoA is caused by predicting the outcome valence (prediction hypothesis) or by retrospectively interpreting the outcome (postdiction hypothesis). To address this, we emulated a social situation where one’s voluntary action was followed by either another’s negative emotional vocalisation or positive emotional vocalisation. Crucially, the relation between an action and the emotional valence of its outcome was predictable in some blocks of trials, but unpredictable in other blocks. Quantitative, implicit measures of SoA based on the intentional binding effect supported the prediction hypothesis. Our findings imply that the social-emotional modulation of SoA is based on predicting the emotional valence of action outcomes.
Article
Full-text available
Temporal binding refers to the compression of the perceived time interval between voluntary actions and their sensory consequences. Research suggests that the emotional content of an action outcome can modulate the effects of temporal binding. We attempted to conceptually replicate these findings using a time interval estimation task and different emotionally-valenced action outcomes (Experiments 1 and 2) than used in previous research. Contrary to previous findings, we found no evidence that temporal binding was affected by the emotional valence of action outcomes. After validating our stimuli for equivalence of perceived emotional valence and arousal (Experiment 3), in Experiment 4 we directly replicated Yoshie and Haggard’s (2013) original experiment using sound vocalizations as action outcomes and failed to detect a significant effect of emotion on temporal binding. These studies suggest that the emotional valence of action outcomes exerts little influence on temporal binding. The potential implications of these findings are discussed.
Article
Full-text available
Sense of agency (SoA) refers to the feeling of controlling one’s own actions, and the experience of controlling external events with one’s actions. The present study examined the effect of strength of intentional effort on SoA. We manipulated the strength of intentional effort using three types of buttons that differed in the amount of force required to depress them. We used a self-attribution task as an explicit measure of SoA. The results indicate that strength of intentional effort enhanced self-attribution when action-effect congruency was unreliable. We concluded that intentional effort importantly affects the integration of multiple cues affecting explicit judgments of agency when the causal relationship action and effect was unreliable.
Article
Full-text available
The temporal relationship between our conscious intentions to act and the action itself has been widely investigated. Previous research consistently shows that the motor intention enters awareness a few 100 ms before movement onset. As research in other domains has shown that most behavior is affected by the emotional state people are in, it is remarkable that the role of emotional states on intention awareness has never been investigated. Here we tested the hypothesis that positive and negative affects have opposite effects on the temporal relationship between the conscious intention to act and the action itself. A mood induction procedure that combined guided imagery and music listening was employed to induce positive, negative, or neutral affective states. After each mood induction session, participants were asked to execute voluntary self-paced movements and to report when they formed the intention to act. Exposure to pleasant material, as compared to exposure to unpleasant material, enhanced positive affect and dampened negative affect. Importantly, in the positive affect condition participants reported their intention to act earlier in time with respect to action onset, as compared to when they were in the negative or in the neutral affect conditions. Conversely the reported time of the intention to act when participants experienced negative affect did not differ significantly from the neutral condition. These findings suggest that the temporal relationship between the conscious intention to act and the action itself is malleable to changes in affective states and may indicate that positive affect enhances intentional awareness.
Article
Sense of agency—a feeling of control over one’s actions and their outcomes—might include at least two components: free choice over which outcome to pursue and motoric control over the action causing the outcome. We orthogonally manipulated locus of outcome choice (free or instructed choice) and motoric control (active or passive movement), while measuring the perceived temporal attraction between actions and outcomes (temporal binding) as an implicit marker of agency. Participants also rated stimulus intensity so that we could measure sensory attenuation, another possible implicit marker of agency. Actions caused higher or lower levels of either painful heat or mild electrotactile stimulation. We found that both motoric control and outcome choice contributed to outcome binding. Moreover, free choice, relative to instructed choice, attenuated the perceived magnitude of high-intensity outcomes, but only when participants made an active movement. Thus, choosing, not just doing, influences temporal binding and sensory attenuation, though in different ways. Our results show that these implicit measures of agency are sensitive to both voluntary motor commands and instrumental control over action outcomes.
Article
In adult life, people normally know what they are doing. This experience of controlling one's own actions and, through them, the course of events in the outside world is called 'sense of agency'. It forms a central feature of human experience; however, the brain mechanisms that produce the sense of agency have only recently begun to be investigated systematically. This recent progress has been driven by the development of better measures of the experience of agency, improved design of cognitive and behavioural experiments, and a growing understanding of the brain circuits that generate this distinctive but elusive experience. The sense of agency is a mental and neural state of cardinal importance in human civilization, because it is frequently altered in psychopathology and because it underpins the concept of responsibility in human societies.
Article
We investigated how the emotional valence of an action outcome influences the experience of control, in an intentional binding experiment. Voluntary actions were followed by emotionally positive or negative human vocalisations, or by neutral tones. We used mental chronometry to measure a retrospective component of sense of agency (SoA), triggered by the occurrence of the action outcome, and a prospective component, driven by the expectation that the outcome will occur. Positive outcomes enhanced the retrospective component of SoA, but only when both occurrence and the valence of the outcome were unexpected. When the valence of outcomes was blocked – and therefore predictable – we found a prospective component of SoA when neutral tones were expected but did not actually occur. This prospective binding was absent, and reversed, for positive and negative expected outcomes. Emotional expectation counteracts the prospective component of SoA, suggesting a distancing effect.