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Listening to your heart and feeling yourself: effects of exposure to interoceptive signals during the ultimatum game

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Abstract

The ultimatum game (UG) is commonly used to study the tension between financial self-interest and social equity motives. Here, we investigated whether experimental exposure to interoceptive signals influences participants’ behavior in the UG. Participants were presented with various bodily sounds—i.e., their own heart, another person’s heart, or the sound of footsteps—while acting both in the role of responder and proposer. We found that listening to one’s own heart sound, compared to the other bodily sounds: (1) increased subjective feelings of unfairness, but not rejection behavior, in response to unfair offers and (2) increased the unfair offers while playing in the proposer role. These findings suggest that heightened feedback of one’s own visceral processes may increase a self-centered perspective and drive socioeconomic exchanges accordingly. In addition, this study introduces a valuable procedure to manipulate online the access to interoceptive signals and for exploring the interplay between viscero-sensory information and cognition.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Jane Aspell for proofreading. This study was supported by EU Information and Communication Technologies Grant (VERE project, FP7-ICT-2009-5, Prot. Num. 257695), the Italian Ministry of Health (and RF-2010-2312912). BL was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant PBELP3-133268). RTA was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) and POPH/FSE (doctoral grant SFRH/BD/60517/2009).

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Author notes

  1. Bigna Lenggenhager

    Present address: University Hospital of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, University of Bern, Bollingenstrasse 111, 3000, Bern 60, Switzerland

  2. Alessandra Mancini

    Present address: Institut des Sciences Cognitives, CNRS, 67 Boulevard Pinel, 69675, Bron, France

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia, Via Ardeatina 306, 00100, Rome, Italy

    Bigna Lenggenhager, Ruben T. Azevedo & Salvatore Maria Aglioti

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Via dei Marsi 78, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Ruben T. Azevedo, Alessandra Mancini & Salvatore Maria Aglioti

Authors
  1. Bigna Lenggenhager
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  2. Ruben T. Azevedo
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  3. Alessandra Mancini
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  4. Salvatore Maria Aglioti
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Correspondence to Bigna Lenggenhager.

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Bigna Lenggenhager and Ruben T. Azevedo share first authorship.

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Lenggenhager, B., Azevedo, R.T., Mancini, A. et al. Listening to your heart and feeling yourself: effects of exposure to interoceptive signals during the ultimatum game. Exp Brain Res 230, 233–241 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-013-3647-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-013-3647-5

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