Researcher at a glance
- Affiliation: Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy, University Hospital of Tübingen (at the time of the 2012 review); later associated with the Tübingen/Munich psychosomatic-interoception tradition
- Orientation: Embodied-cognition reading of interoception: cardiac awareness (heartbeat perception) as the individual-differences route into emotion, self-regulation and the bodily self; psychopathology as a failure to translate bodily signals into conscious feeling
Key contributions
- With Olga Pollatos, articulated the interoception–embodiment bridge — joining the heartbeat-perception/emotion literature to embodied-cognition theory and framing alexithymia and eating disorders as disturbances of embodiment (Herbert & Pollatos (2012)).
- Her own empirical programme (known here only by citation): high alexithymia associated with low interoceptive awareness on a heartbeat-perception task (Herbert et al. 2010a); IA linked to physical self-regulation/workload (Herbert, Ulbrich & Schandry 2007b); an EEG study of interoceptive sensitivity and emotion processing (Herbert, Pollatos & Schandry 2007a); IA and cardiac autonomic reactivity during emotional picture viewing and mental stress (Herbert et al. 2010b).
Key papers
- Herbert, B. M., & Pollatos, O. (2012). The Body in the Mind: On the Relationship Between Interoception and Embodiment. Topics in Cognitive Science, 4(4), 692-704. — Herbert & Pollatos (2012)
- Herbert, B. M., Herbert, C., & Pollatos, O. (2011). On the relationship between interoceptive awareness and alexithymia: Is interoceptive awareness related to emotional awareness? Journal of Personality, 79, 1149-1175. — not in
raw/, cited via the 2012 review.
Connections
- Debates: Is more interoceptive awareness better?, inferential?
- Related researchers: Olga Pollatos, Rainer Schandry, A. D. (Bud) Craig, Antonio R. Damasio
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 A. D. (Bud) Craig (the insular hierarchy and “global emotional moment” are adopted wholesale) and Antonio R. 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 inferential?.