Olga Pollatos

The wiki’s representative of the pre-Dunn consensus: the body of work, largely German psychophysiological and largely built on the heartbeat-detection-task, holding that people who perceive their hearts well experience emotion more intensely.

Known here through one paper read first-hand, Pollatos, Kirsch & Schandry (2005), plus citations.

The position

Straightforwardly Jamesian, and stated as such. If feelings originate in the perception of bodily states, then people who perceive bodily states better should feel more. Pollatos et al. (2005) put it as a syllogism in their introduction — “Subjects with good heartbeat perception… should experience emotions more intensely due to their heightened ability to perceive their bodily states” — and then report data consistent with it: good perceivers rated affective pictures as more arousing (r = 0.34 with the heartbeat score), with larger P300s and larger left-lateralized slow waves.

Her introduction is also the wiki’s best short statement of what the field believed in 2005: “Most of the studies addressing this question found a positive relationship between heartbeat perception and emotional experience,” citing Schandry (1981), Wiens et al. (2000), Critchley et al. (2004), Ferguson & Katkin (1996) and Montoya et al. (1993), with Blascovich et al. (1992) noted as the lone contrary finding.

Why the wiki holds this position at arm’s length

Not because of the data, which look fine, but because of what the design leaves out — and it is the same omission across this tradition.

The body is never measured. Pollatos et al. recorded ECG and used it only to score the counting task; no cardiac response to the pictures is reported. So the chain the argument needs — better perception → more perceived bodily change → more felt arousal — has its middle term missing, and the study cannot distinguish a Jamesian account from one in which the heartbeat score proxies sympathetic tone. Given that stroke volume predicts heartbeat counting (Schandry et al. 1993, by her own co-author — see rainer-schandry), that alternative is not idle: “these people’s hearts are louder” predicts the whole result set, including the emotion-general P300 effect, with no perception in it.

This is precisely the gap Dunn identified across the somatic-marker and interoception literatures, and Pollatos et al. exemplify it while claiming to support James.

The disagreement with Dunn

Set out in full on pollatos-2005-interoceptive-awareness-erp and tracked on is-more-interoceptive-awareness-better. In brief: Pollatos et al. (2005) and Dunn et al. (2010) Study 1 run nearly the same experiment and disagree about whether interoceptive accuracy has a main effect on felt arousal. Pollatos: yes, F(1, 39) = 5.90. Dunn: no.

The wiki does not adjudicate this, and specifically does not treat Dunn’s null as having settled it. Two considerations cut in Pollatos’s favour and two against:

• For: her extreme-groups design (22 good perceivers selected from ~140, plus matched comparisons) has more power to detect a group difference than Dunn’s unselected sample; and a main effect of accuracy is arithmetically what Dunn’s own interaction predicts once you average over bodily responses that are not centred on zero.
• Against: the same selection inflates the correlations she reports as though they were population estimates; and she cannot test Dunn’s model at all, having never measured the bodily response it turns on.

Where they agree is more interesting than where they differ. Both find interoceptive accuracy has no relationship to felt valence — Pollatos F(1, 39) = 0.14, Dunn delta-R-squared = .00. Two labs, two designs, five years apart, one dissociation. See core-affect.

Note on this page

Built from a single paper. Pollatos’s later work (interoception in eating disorders, obesity, anxiety, and interoceptive training) is outside what raw/ contains, and this page should not be read as a summary of her programme — only of the one contribution the wiki has read.