What we do

The API group aims to explore the interplay between mind and body, focusing on interoception processes and bodily representations in the social and affective domains. Through psychophysiological measurements (e.g., skin conductance, heart rate, body temperature) and behavioral techniques, we investigate how emotions influence physiological responses and bodily sensations. 

Who we are

Principal InvestigatorAssistant Professor (RTD-A), PhD
Scholar, X, ResearchGate 
Giada is interested in understanding the interactions between mind and body in shaping affective experiences.
PhD Student - Psychology
Veronica is interested in understanding the dynamics of emotions, starting from their mental representations to their physiological expression within the body.
PhD Student -Psychology
Gaia is interested in how social and gendered experiences influence emotional regulation and body perception, integrating insights from social neuroscience and interoception.

What we publish

Affect in the dark: Navigating the complex landscape of social cognition in blindness

Domenici, Collignon, LettieriProgress in Brain Research, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/bs.pbr.2025.02.002
ABSTRACT: Research on the consequence of blindness has primarily focused on how visual experience influences basic sensory abilities, mainly overlooking the intricate world of social cognition. However, social cognition abilities are crucial as they enable individuals to navigate complex interactions, understand others’ perspectives, regulate emotions, and establish meaningful connections, all essential for successful adaptation and integration into society. Emotional and social signals are frequently conveyed through nonverbal visual cues, and understanding the foundational role vision plays in shaping everyday affective experiences is fundamental. Here, we aim to summarize existing research on social cognition in individuals with blindness. By doing so, we strive to offer a comprehensive overview of social processing in sensory deprivation while pinpointing areas that are still largely unexplored. By identifying gaps in current knowledge, this review paves the way for future investigations to reveal how visual experience shapes the development of emotional and social cognition in the mind and the brain.

Visual experience shapes bodily representation of emotion 

Lettieri, Calce, Giraudet, CollignonEMOTION, 2024. DOI: 10.1037/emo0001440
ABSTRACT: Philosophers and experimentalists have long debated whether bodily representation of emotion is grounded in our sensory experience. Indeed, we are used to observe emotional reactions expressed through the bodies of others, yet it is still unknown whether this observation influences how we experience affective states in our own bodies. To delve into this question, we developed a naturalistic haptic task and asked a group of early (n=20) and late (n=20) blind, as well as sighted individuals (n=20) to indicate where in the body they perceive changes associated with affective states. Our results show that visual experience shapes bodily representation of emotion. Blind and sighted individuals attribute different importance to body regions in relation to specific emotional states, as sighted people focus more on visceral sensations, while blind report as more relevant the mouth and the hand areas. We also observe differences in the coherence of bodily maps of specific emotions, such as aggressiveness, for which early and late blind are homogenous in reporting the mouth, while sighted subjects demonstrate a scattered pattern of activation across the body. Finally, our findings show that blind people rely on a different organization of affect, as only sighted categorize bodily maps of emotion through the valence and arousal dimensions. In summary, we demonstrate that sensory experience impacts the bodily representation of affect by modulating the relevance that different body parts have in emotional reactions, by modifying the weights attributed to interoceptive and exteroceptive signals, and by changing how emotions are conceptualized in the body.

Dissecting abstract, modality-specific and experience-dependent coding of affect in the human brain

Lettieri, Handjaras, Cappello, Setti, Bottari, Bruno, Diano, Leo, Tinti, Garbarini, Pietrini, Ricciardi, CecchettiScience Advances, 2024. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adk6840
ABSTRACT: Emotion and perception are tightly intertwined, as affective experiences often arise from the appraisal of sensory information. Nonetheless, whether the brain encodes emotional instances using a sensory-specific code or in a more abstract manner is unclear. Here, we answer this question by measuring the association between emotion ratings collected during a unisensory or multisensory presentation of a full-length movie and brain activity recorded in typically developed, congenitally blind and congenitally deaf participants. Emotional instances are encoded in a vast network encompassing sensory, prefrontal, and temporal cortices. Within this network, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex stores a categorical representation of emotion independent of modality and previous sensory experience, and the posterior superior temporal cortex maps the valence dimension using an abstract code. Sensory experience more than modality affects how the brain organizes emotional information outside supramodal regions, suggesting the existence of a scaffold for the representation of emotional states where sensory inputs during development shape its functioning.