ArticlePsychophysiology2024
Linking brain-heart interactions to emotional arousal in immersive virtual reality.
Article in Psychophysiology, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Autonomic Dysregulation in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Simultaneous Assessment of Electrodermal, Cardiac, and Oculomotor Responses to Triggering Videos-An Exploratory Study.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Brain-body interactions in systemic diseases: a survey from an imaging perspective.MedScience · 2026Review
- Bridging Space Perception, Emotions, and Artificial Intelligence in Neuroarchitecture.Brain sciences · 2026Review
- Neural Sensitivity to the Heartbeat Is Modulated by Fluctuations in Affective Arousal during Spontaneous Thought.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Neural sensitivity to the heartbeat is modulated by fluctuations in affective arousal during spontaneous thought.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- A Pilot Study on Emotional Equivalence Between VR and Real Spaces Using EEG and Heart Rate Variability.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Modeling Emotional Arousal With Turbulence Measured by EEG.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- Linking brain-heart interactions to emotional arousal in immersive virtual reality.Psychophysiology · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The subjective experience of emotions is linked to the contextualized perception and appraisal of changes in bodily (e.g., heart) activity. Increased emotional arousal has been related to attenuated high-frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV), lower EEG parieto-occipital alpha power, and higher heartbeat-evoked potential (HEP) amplitudes. We studied emotional arousal-related brain-heart interactions using immersive virtual reality (VR) for naturalistic yet controlled emotion induction. Twenty-nine healthy adults (13 women, age: 26 ± 3) completed a VR experience that included rollercoasters while EEG and ECG were recorded. Continuous emotional arousal ratings were collected during a video replay immediately after. We analyzed emotional arousal-related changes in HF-HRV as well as in BHIs using HEPs. Additionally, we used the oscillatory information in the ECG and the EEG to model the directional information flows between the brain and heart activity. We found that higher emotional arousal was associated with lower HEP amplitudes in a left fronto-central electrode cluster. While parasympathetic modulation of the heart (HF-HRV) and parieto-occipital EEG alpha power were reduced during higher emotional arousal, there was no evidence for the hypothesized emotional arousal-related changes in bidirectional information flow between them. Whole-brain exploratory analyses in additional EEG (delta, theta, alpha, beta and gamma) and HRV (low-frequency, LF, and HF) frequency bands revealed a temporo-occipital cluster, in which higher emotional arousal was linked to decreased brain-to-heart (i.e., gamma→HF-HRV) and increased heart-to-brain (i.e., LF-HRV → gamma) information flow. Our results confirm previous findings from less naturalistic experiments and suggest a link between emotional arousal and brain-heart interactions in temporo-occipital gamma power.
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Registered trials
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