Beate M. Herbert

The Tübingen half of the Herbert & Pollatos partnership, and the wiki’s representative of the embodied-cognition reading of the Munich/Tübingen heartbeat-perception tradition — the same lineage as olga-pollatos and rainer-schandry, but with the emphasis put on embodiment rather than on emotion intensity alone.

Known here through a single first-hand document, the review Herbert & Pollatos (2012), plus citations to her empirical work. Her programme’s distinctive claim is that cardiac awareness indexes how well bodily signals are translated into conscious feeling, so its failures — alexithymia especially — are disturbances of embodiment rather than deficits of a separate emotional module. That claim is the trait-level form of the Brewer/Bird “alexithymia is a general deficit of interoception” direction the alexithymia page tracks, and Herbert’s own heartbeat-perception ↔ alexithymia finding (Herbert et al. 2010a/2011) is one of its supports.

Held at arm’s length, for the same reason as the rest of this tradition

The wiki reads the Munich/Tübingen heartbeat programme cautiously because the bodily signal is rarely measured and the heartbeat score is confoundable with cardiodynamics (stroke volume predicts heartbeat counting; Schandry et al. 1993 — see interoceptive-sensitivity, rainer-schandry). Herbert’s work inherits this, and the 2012 review inherits it wholesale, being a synthesis rather than a controlled study. Her primary papers are not in raw/, so this page should be read as covering only the one contribution the wiki has read first-hand — the review — not her empirical programme.

Relation to the wiki’s other figures

Straightforwardly downstream of ad-craig (the insular hierarchy and “global emotional moment” are adopted wholesale) and antonio-damasio (the somatic-marker framing), and a peer of olga-pollatos, with whom she shares the review and the underlying paradigm. Not a predictive-coding theorist: the 2012 framing is read-out/embodied-cognition, invoking reactivation of sensory-motor states rather than inference, which places her on the Craig/Damasio side of feedforward-vs-predictive-interoception.