Effects of emotional valence on sense of agency require a predictive model.

ABSTRACT: Sense of agency (SoA), a feeling that one's voluntary actions produce events in the external world, is a key factor behind every goal-directed human behaviour. Recent studies have demonstrated that SoA is reduced when one's voluntary action causes negative outcomes, compared to when it causes positive outcomes. It is yet unclear whether this emotional modulation of SoA is caused by predicting the outcome valence (prediction hypothesis) or by retrospectively interpreting the outcome (postdiction hypothesis). To address this, we emulated a social situation where one's voluntary action was followed by either another's negative emotional vocalisation or positive emotional vocalisation. Crucially, the relation between an action and the emotional valence of its outcome was predictable in some bl

SUBMITTER: Yoshie M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5562802 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature