ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Cardiac sympathetic-vagal activity initiates a functional brain-body response to emotional arousal.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 57 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
57 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 145 citations in OpenAlex.
- Coactivation of Autonomic and Central Nervous Systems During Processing of Socially Relevant Information in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Review.Neuropsychology review · 2024Pooled it
- Autonomic nervous system activity correlates with peak experiences induced by DMT and predicts increases in well-being.Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) · 2024Trial
- Modelling the time-resolved modulations of cardiac activity in rats: A study on pharmacological autonomic stimulation.The Journal of physiology · 2026Article
- Vagal PIEZO2-Positive Neurons Mediate Blood Volume Sensing and Circulatory Homeostasis Regulation.Neuroscience bulletin · 2026Article
- The Qur'anic heart and converging evidence from contemporary cardiac science: From qalb to cardioception.Journal of Taibah University Medical Sciences · 2026Review
- Temporal dynamic brain-heart interaction alterations associated with suicidal ideation in major depressive disorder.BMC psychiatry · 2026Article
- Distinct brain systems support afferent and efferent autonomic activity.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Many labels, shared threat processes: classifying domain-labelled anxieties by mechanism rather than context.Psychoradiology · 2026Review
- Cardiovascular Activity Predominantly Modulates Brain Dynamics in Non-REM Sleep Transitions.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Integrating neural, physiological, and interoceptive measures in social interaction.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Article
- Virtual reality-induced emotion recognition with deep learning-based multimodal physiological feature fusion.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- When your heart isn't in it anymore: cardiac correlates of task disengagement.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Mapping EEG Metrics to Human Affective and Cognitive Models: An Interdisciplinary Scoping Review from a Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Heartbeat perception is causally linked to frontal delta oscillations.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Enhanced Brain-Heart Connectivity as a Precursor of Reduced State Anxiety after Therapeutic Virtual Reality Immersion.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Feature Analysis of Facial Color Information During Emotional Arousal in Japanese Older Adults Playing eSports.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Dynamic brain-heart interaction in sleep characterized by variational phase-amplitude coupling framework.Communications biology · 2025Article
- The brain-heart axis: integrative cooperation of neural, mechanical and biochemical pathways.Nature reviews. Cardiology · 2025Review
- BrainFusion: a Low-Code, Reproducible, and Deployable Software Framework for Multimodal Brain‒Computer Interface and Brain‒Body Interaction Research.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Advanced and long-term meditation and the autonomic nervous system: A review and synthesis.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2025Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A century-long debate on bodily states and emotions persists. While the involvement of bodily activity in emotion physiology is widely recognized, the specificity and causal role of such activity related to brain dynamics has not yet been demonstrated. We hypothesize that the peripheral neural control on cardiovascular activity prompts and sustains brain dynamics during an emotional experience, so these afferent inputs are processed by the brain by triggering a concurrent efferent information transfer to the body. To this end, we investigated the functional brain–heart interplay under emotion elicitation in publicly available data from 62 healthy subjects using a computational model based on synthetic data generation of electroencephalography and electrocardiography signals. Our findings show that sympathovagal activity plays a leading and causal role in initiating the emotional response, in which ascending modulations from vagal activity precede neural dynamics and correlate to the reported level of arousal. The subsequent dynamic interplay observed between the central and autonomic nervous systems sustains the processing of emotional arousal. These findings should be particularly revealing for the psychophysiology and neuroscience of emotions.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.