Affective polarization has become a central concept to explain how citizens think and behave in Western democracies. However, while research has made great progress studying the causes, consequences, and remedies of this concept, we know surprisingly little about how affective polarization actually feels. This research note contributes to recent efforts to characterize affective polarization with specific emotions. Drawing on cross-sectional data from five European countries (Denmark, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United Kingdom; total N = 4,794), we analyze which emotions respondents report to experience toward in-party and out-party voters and which of these emotions correlate with affective polarization scores. While we find that only a few respondents report negative emotions toward in-party voters, they feel moderate amounts of hope, enthusiasm, and pride without being exuberant. Fear-related emotions toward out-party voters are rare, and while one in five respondents experiences extreme anger, disappointment, or disgust toward opponents, up to 50% experience these emotions just slightly or not at all. The emotions most consistently related to affective polarization are positive emotions toward in-party voters and - to a lesser extent - aversion, hate, and disgust toward opponents. We describe patterns across countries and demographic backgrounds and highlight a practical implication: affective polarization feels more positive than what prevailing notions of 'fear and loathing' let believe.

Early adolescence is a critical time marked by dynamic changes in physiology, appearance and social environment. These changes are also reflected in how adolescents perceive themselves, in-cluding their bodies. The transition from pre-pubertal through pubertal stages allows us to con-sider the development of the self from the perspective of how body perception, both from within and from the outside, changes. While research in adults and post-puberty adolescents suggests that lower interoceptive accuracy is associated with greater body image concerns, how these fac-tors interact during puberty remains unknown. We tested a sample of 181 girls (aged 10-14 years), spanning from pre-puberty to post-puberty, on measures of interoceptive accuracy and behavioural and self-report measures of body image. Lower interoceptive accuracy predicted greater body image dissatisfaction. Moreover, this relationship was moderated by puberty stage, showing that the protective effect of higher interoceptive accuracy against body image dissatis-faction was stronger during more advanced stages of puberty. Our findings show that interocep-tive influences extend from the basic multisensory integration to conscious attitudes about our body during a critical developmental period, highlighting the positive role that better interocep-tion can play in mental health.

This study investigates how emotions shape the psychological processes underlying the correction of political misperceptions and how the source of corrective information interacts with these emotional dynamics. Using two scenario-based survey experiments conducted in the US and UK (N=3,610), we examine the effects of corrective information about the anthropogenic causes of climate change when delivered by either experts or citizens’ assemblies. We find that corrective information consistently elicits heightened negative emotions (e.g., anger, frustration, anxiety) and suppresses positive emotions (e.g., happiness, enthusiasm). Importantly, only two discrete emotions—anxiety and empathy—significantly predict greater willingness to revise misperceptions. Contrary to expectations, the source of corrective information does not produce differential emotional or behavioural effects. These findings advance understanding of the emotional mechanisms influencing misperception correction, highlight the nuanced role of specific emotions in shaping corrective behaviour, and contribute to the literature on citizen-centred political institutions and their public influence. Our results have broader implications for research on the emotional foundations of political beliefs and opinion formation in polarized contexts.

How we perceive time is shaped by attention and emotion, but more recent work suggests that information related to one’s self can also expand subjective time. However, previous self-relevance manipulations have been confounded with familiarity, affective meaning, or embodiment. Across three online experiments, we tested whether minimal self-relevance created through arbitrary shape-label associations was sufficient to bias duration perception. Participants learned that geometric shapes referred to themselves, a stranger, and, in Experiments 2 and 3, a friend. They then completed a non-temporal task probing the learned associations, followed by a duration bisection task in which they estimated the duration of the associated shapes. The non-temporal tasks produced robust self-prioritisation: self-associated shapes were processed faster and more accurately than stranger-associated shapes, with evidence for a graded self–friend–stranger pattern in Experiments 2 and 3. Yet self-association did not produce the predicted temporal expansion. A small increase in temporal precision for self-associated shapes in Experiment 1 did not replicate, and pooled analyses showed only very small temporal effects. These findings suggest a distinction between minimal, task-instructed self-associations that can bias non-temporal decisions and richer forms of self-relevance that may be needed to shape time experience.

Past work shows that conservatives prefer more dominant-looking political leaders, whereas liberals prefer more trustworthy-looking ones. We extend this by showing that, beyond partisanship, discrete political emotions independently shape preferences for leaders’ facial traits. A balanced sample of U.S. Republicans and Democrats identified the political issue that made them most angry or most afraid and then chose which leader would best address that issue using computer-generated faces varying in dominance and trustworthiness. Participants chose a more dominant and less trustworthy-looking leader more often when angry (49.5 percent) than when fearful (46.5 percent). Mechanistically, anger shifted choices toward more dominant-looking leaders by increasing reliance on dominance cues and reducing reliance on trustworthiness cues, whereas fear selectively increased reliance on trustworthiness cues. These findings show that political emotions exert distinct influences on leader evaluation with implications for democratic decision-making and electoral choices.

Where does political ideology come from? Past research linked stronger physiological responses to threat and disgust with conservatism, suggesting a neurobiological basis for ideology. However, replication failures cast doubt on a direct link between physiology and political attitudes. Given interoception’s role in awareness and emotion regulation, we tested whether interoceptive sensibility (i.e., awareness of internal bodily states) moderates the relationship between disgust sensitivity and ideology. Using survey data from 632 participants, we found that disgust sensitivity predicted conservative ideology, but this association was moderated by interoceptive sensibility. Among those with lower interoception, higher disgust sensitivity increased the likelihood of identifying as conservative, and lower disgust with being liberal. This relationship disappeared among those with higher interoception. We suggest individuals with lower interoception are more susceptible to socially constructed associations between physiological states and ideology. These findings lay the groundwork for more mechanistic, replicable research on psychophysiological antecedents of political cognition.

Many of today’s young people are anxious about the future. Yet the consequences of their anxiety on democratic support and engagement remain underexplored. In this preregistered survey experiment we tested the causal effects of future anxiety on youth’s democratic attitudes. We exposed young people (N = 1,895; ages 16–26) to social media posts about the cost of living which were manipulated to induce future anxiety, reduce it through hope, or serve as a control. Increasing their future anxiety (vs. hope) resulted in a small but precisely estimated decrease in democratic support (−2.5 percentage points; 95% CI [−4.3, −0.8]), but without any effects on a behavioural candidate-choice task or on self-reported willingness to participate in politics. Conversely, hope (vs. control and anxiety) increased young people’s likelihood to seek information on how to get democratically involved (+6.9 percentage points; 95% CI [1.7, 12.0]). These findings provide experimental evidence that future-oriented feelings shape youth’s democratic support amidst multiple crises.

Emotions are central to our political decision-making and behavior. Fear and anger are particu-larly consequential, as fear directs attention to threats and fosters reliance on institutions, where-as anger reduces trust and promotes confrontation. However, it remains unclear if and how polit-ical emotions can be easily prescribed, who is most susceptible and what are the political conse-quences. In a preregistered representative experiment (N = 1,000 U.S. citizens), participants se-lected a salient political issue and reported whether they felt fearful or angry. The treatment group was then informed that most in-party members felt the opposite emotion. Compared to control, treated participants showed greater emotional shifts toward the in-group emotion. Shift-ing from fear to anger increased preference for authoritarian-looking political leaders, demonstrat-ing behavioural relevance. Emotional malleability was greater among individuals higher in alex-ithymia and perceived stress. Our findings show how political emotions are socially malleable with the power to change political choices.

Political emotions are widely acknowledged as key drivers of political participation and polarization. Yet while it is well established that political emotions matter, far less is known about how they are felt and represented in the body. Across a preregistered, nationally representative study (N = 992), we introduce an embodied approach to political emotion using the validated emBODY-tool, which allows participants to map where in the body they experience sensations when feeling canonical emotions (e.g., anger) and their political counterparts (e.g., "political anger"). Specifically, we address three questions: 1) how political emotions are embodied and differ from their nonpolitical counterparts, 2) whether political dispositions influence how these political emotions are embodied, and 3) how their embodied experience interacts with political dispositions in explaining political attitudes and behavior. Pixelwise bodily sensation maps and aggregated "embodied impact" metrics show that political anger, anxiety, depression, disgust, and hope do not merely mirror their canonical forms, but take on distinct bodily patterns. Political ideology, but not political sophistication, modulates these bodily experiences, with Democrat-leaning participants reporting more intense sensations for negative political emotions, suggesting the presence of "ideological bodies." Crucially, political participation is not explained by how intensely people report feeling emotions, but is instead closely linked to how strongly these emotions are embodied in the body. Together, our findings underscore the body's central role in democratic engagement by showing how political contexts shape embodied emotional experience and how these embodied experiences shape politics and democracy.

Sensing and monitoring changes in our heart rate is a key aspect of interoception. We introduce and test the construct validity of the Heart Rate Matching task (HRM), a novel, fast and accessible task designed to assess the ability to estimate heart rate, in both remote (i.e., online) and in-lab settings. In the first lab experiment, under- and over-estimations of the heart rate were not significantly correlated with two interoceptive tasks designed to assess perception of individual heartbeats; the adapted Heartbeat Counting and the Multi-Interval Heartbeat Discrimination tasks. A second experiment conducted online in a large sample, found moderate significant correlations between Heart Rate Matching and the original Heartbeat Counting task. The HRM also correlated with a matched exteroceptive task, highlighting involvement of shared multi-sensory integration processes. The third experiment demonstrated good test-retest reliability of the HRM and moderate correlations with the Heart Rate Discrimination task, also thought to assess the estimation of heart rate. Taken together, these data suggest acceptable validity and moderate reliability of the Heart Rate Matching task and fit with an interpretation of the task as a measure of heart rate beliefs.

Peaceful transfers of power are a fundamental principle of democracy. Yet, in times of heightened affective polarisation, election losses may trigger strong negative emotional reactions in partisans, which in turn undermine support for fundamental democratic principles among partisans. We test this idea through two pre-registered survey experiments conducted after the 2022 and 2024 elections in the United States. We randomly assign partisans to receive either a placebo or an emotive reminder about the election that their party lost, containing others' angry or worried reactions at the election outcome. Contrary to our pre-registered expectations, we do not find evidence that priming negative feelings about electoral loss affects support for political violence or democratic norms. Emotive reminders about salient political events can momentarily turn up the heat on politics, but are not enough to propel partisans to adopt extreme anti-democratic attitudes. By linking the study of emotions to democratic norms, this article contributes to our understanding of when negative emotions (fail to) radicalise partisans.

Democracy takes effort, and these efforts do not always benefit one’s own political side. Across two preregistered studies (total N = 916), we used computational modeling of effortful behavior to measure US partisans’ motivation to strengthen democratic engagement in rural (traditionally Republican-leaning), urban (traditionally Democratic-leaning), or all US areas. Study 1 showed that participants were generally willing to make pro-democratic efforts, but less so when efforts benefited out-group areas, particularly among more affectively polarized participants. We hypothesized that this asymmetry is sustained by misperceptions about out-partisans’ willingness to engage in cross-partisan pro-democratic efforts. Study 2 showed that most participants (87%) underestimated out-party effort willingness. Importantly, correcting this misperception increased motivation to support out-group areas without significantly reducing in-group motivation. These findings suggest that cross-partisan pro-democratic motivation is common but partly obscured by misperceptions about out-partisans’ willingness, and that making this willingness visible might help sustain the collective effort democracy depends on.

Time perception is inherently malleable, influenced by both emotional and bodily states. Past research suggests that transient heartbeat-linked interoceptive signals can modulate time perception, with some studies reporting that brief stimuli presented during cardiac systole are perceived as shorter than those during diastole. Here, we used electroencephalography (EEG) across two experiments to examine how such cardiac-phase effects are neurally instantiated, and how they interact with emotional content of the stimuli. In Experiment 1, participants judged the duration of brief neutral visual stimuli (Gabor patches) presented during systole or diastole. We did not observe a reliable group-level behavioural cardiac-phase effect. Despite that, EEG revealed systolic modulation of late visual activity. Crucially, exploratory analyses showed that more negative late cortical activity predicted temporal underestimation only during systole, not diastole. In Experiment 2, we extended this design to emotionally salient stimuli (neutral vs fearful faces). Fearful faces were perceived as shorter in duration and accompanied by enhanced N170-like negativity compared to neutral faces. But this effect was not modulated by cardiac phase, suggesting that emotional salience is a much more powerful driver of duration perception than subtle cardiac fluctuations. Yet, even for faces, enhanced EEG negativity predicted temporal contraction only during systole. Together, these findings reveal that while group-level behavioural cardiac-phase effects are variable, the systole-specific neural mechanism, whereby reduced cortical activity predicts temporal contraction, replicated across both experiments. This suggests that cardiac signals can shape duration perception through transient modulation of cortical processing.

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables non-invasive heart rate (HR) measurement via video, offering a promising tool for remote physiological monitoring. In a previous study, we validated an adapted rPPG algorithm developed by van der Kooij and Naber (Behav Res Methods 51(5):2106–2119, 2019), collecting video via an online platform using a common web browser and comparing results to phone-based HR measurements. In the present study, we extend this methodological pipeline by validating the same refined algorithm and online video collection pipeline against electrocardiogram (ECG) ground-truth measurements. While previous studies have typically relied on online data collection without ECG reference standards or laboratory-based protocols lacking online implementation, our study bridges this gap by directly comparing video data collected through a standard web browser using the Gorilla Experiment Builder platform with simultaneous ECG recordings. We also evaluated the optimal conditions for rPPG accuracy in terms of video duration and distance from the webcam. We recorded 180 videos across five durations (10 s, 25 s, 35 s, 45 s, and 100 s) and two distances (close = 35 cm, far = 50 cm). Results showed excellent agreement between rPPG- and ECG-derived HR, with an intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) of 0.96 and 95

Previous research indicates that conservatives exhibit stronger disgust sensitivity than liberals, especially regarding moral disgust, but recent findings suggest that physiological responses alone do not account for differences in subjective disgust experiences. Given the role of interoception in better body-awareness and emotion regulation, we investigated whether the relationship between disgust and political ideology is moderated by interoceptive sensibility (i.e., one’s ability to be attuned to their physiology). Using survey data from 632 U.S. participants (321 Democrats, 311 Republicans), we found that high interoceptive sensibility eliminated differences in disgust sensitivity between Democrats and Republicans. In contrast, low interoceptive sensibility amplified these differences: high disgust sensitivity predicted Republican identification, while low disgust sensitivity predicted Democrat identification, especially for moral disgust.We propose that when people’s ability to detect physiological changes is low, they may rely more on cognitive predictions and learned expectations to interpret their experiences. This reliance on top-down processing can lead to heightened disgust sensitivity, particularly in conservatives, due to their stronger association between moral concerns and disgust sensitivity. This research highlights the importance of interoception in political psychology, offering a novel perspective on the psychophysiological underpinnings of political attitudes, paving the way for replicable and causal studies.

Human experimental psychology seems inextricably bound up with a notion of self, or individual mental life. The link between self and body has always been acknowledged, but psychologists have few ways to investigate, analyze, or understand this link. As 2025 marks the 50th birthday of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance and 20 years since the publication of our "Re-Visiting the Rubber Hand Illusion" article in the journal, we take this opportunity to reflect on the impact, reach, and major developments that followed its publication. In particular, we focus on how the methods and theoretical constructs from our article have extended the concepts of bodily self-awareness toward other fields beyond experimental psychology. Our article helped to develop experimental approaches to understanding the role of the body in self-awareness, and mental life more generally. The combination of rigorous experimental methods and a clear theoretical model has allowed psychologists to have a clearer view of the relation between body and self.

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 of refugees. However, the impact of artworks vs photojournalistic images depicting refugees on their infrahumanisation remains a key and unexplored topic. In this pre-registered study, we investigated whether viewing different types of visual images (e.g., paintings vs photographs) of refugees using distinct visual framings (e.g., large or small groups) influences viewers' infrahumanisation of refugees and the intensity and valence of the viewers' felt emotions. Contrary to our predictions, no evidence was found for an effect of visual framing (large vs small groups) and different image types (paintings vs photos) portraying refugees on their infra-humanisation. Moreover, and in line with our predictions, photojournalistic images were evaluated as more emotionally intense than paintings, whereas paintings rather than photojournalistic images engaged more positive emotions, demonstrating that different types of images involve distinct affective responses. Furthermore, exploratory findings revealed that increased positive appraisals of photojournalistic images depicting small groups rather than large groups led to greater humanisation of refugees. This suggests that positive emotions can decrease the infrahumanisation of marginalized groups, particularly when these are evoked by photojournalistic images. Overall, these findings shed new light on the effects of audience exposure to different forms of visual representation and their social and emotional consequences.

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 only on the age of 5–7 mo, limiting the generalizability of the results. Here, we used a modified version of the cardiac interoceptive sensitivity paradigm introduced by Maister et al., 2017 in 3-, 9-, and 18-mo-old infants using cross-sectional and longitudinal approaches. Going beyond, we introduce a novel experimental paradigm, namely the iBREATH, to investigate respiratory interoceptive sensitivity in infants. Overall, for cardiac interoceptive sensitivity (total n=135) we find rather stable evidence across ages with infants on average preferring stimuli presented synchronously to their heartbeat. For respiratory interoceptive sensitivity (total n=120) our results show a similar pattern in the first year of life, but not at 18 mo. We did not observe a strong relationship between cardiac and respiratory interoceptive sensitivity at 3 and 9 mo but found some evidence for a relationship at 18 mo. We validated our results using specification curve- and mega-analytic approaches. By examining early cardiac and respiratory interoceptive processing, we provide evidence that infants are sensitive to their interoceptive signals.

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 comparator between exteroceptive and interoceptive information. However, few paradigms have examined effects of somatosensory FFB. Participants rated the emotional intensity of randomized facial expressions while they received 20 s blocks of pulsatile somatosensory stimulation at rates higher than HR, lower than HR, equivalent to HR, or no stimulation during a functional magnetic resonance neuroimaging scan. FFB exerted a bidirectional effect on reported intensity ratings of the emotional faces, increasing over the course of each 20 s stimulation block. Neuroimaging showed FFB engaging regions indicative of affective touch processing, embodiment, and reflex suppression. Contrasting higher vs. lower HR FFB revealed engagement of right insula and centres supporting socio-emotional processing. Results indicate that exposure to pulsatile somatosensory stimulation can influence emotional judgements though its progressive embodiment as a perceived interoceptive arousal state, biasing how affective salience is ascribed to external stimuli. Results are consistent with multimodal integration of priors and prediction-error signalling in shaping perceptual judgments.