momilab.imtlucca.it

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

GiadaLettieri

Principal InvestigatorAssistant Professor (RTD-A), PhD
Scholar, X, ResearchGate
Giada is interested in understanding the interactions between mind and body in shaping affective experiences.

VeronicaDomenici

PhD StudentXXXIX - Psychology
Scholar
Veronica is interested in understanding the dynamics of emotions, starting from their mental representations to their physiological expression within the body.

Gaia CarlottaFiamberti

PhD Student XL- Psychology
Scholar, ResearchGate
Gaia is interested in how social and gendered experiences influence emotional regulation and body perception, integrating insights from social neuroscience and interoception.

AgneseScarpellini

PhD Student XLI - Psychology
Agnese is interested in exploring the relationships between sensory experience, bodily awareness and emotions, with a particular focus on how blindness influences interoceptive processing.

GaiaPellegrini

MSc Student -Psychology
Gaia is interested in understanding both the psychophysiological and qualitative aspects of emotions, seeking to grasp their deep connection. She would like to investigate how emotions are linked to bodily experiences that both influence and result from mental processes.

What we publish

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.

Integrating neural, physiological, and interoceptive measures in social interaction

LettieriFrontiers in Neuroscience, 2026. DOI: 10.3389.fnins.2026.1771470

ABSTRACT: Social interaction is not simply the meeting of two brains, but the emergent product of continuously coupled brain-body systems within and between individuals. Hyper scanning studies have shown that interacting partners exhibit inter-brain synchrony during cooperation, conversation, and joint attention, consolidating neural coupling as a marker of shared engagement. Yet neural data alone cannot tell us whether individuals are aligned in their emotions, arousal, or regulatory strategies, nor how these states evolve in real time. In parallel, work on physiological synchrony has revealed that partners' autonomic signals also converge during interaction, tracking rapport, cohesion, and cooperative success. Interoception, the sensing and representation of internal bodily signals, provides a conceptual bridge between these levels. Atypical interoceptive processing is increasingly implicated across conditions marked by social difficulties, and emerging hyper scanning studies show that directing attention to bodily rhythms can enhance both autonomic and neural alignment. In this Perspective, I argue for a framework in which social behavior arises from multilevel coupling among neural activity, autonomic physiology, and interoceptive processes. I outline how multimodal hyperscanning in naturalistic tasks, combined with temporally sensitive analyses, can clarify when and how these levels interact, from dyads to groups. Finally, I discuss clinical and developmental horizons in which multimodal synchrony serves both as a mechanistic readout and a potential target for interventions that stabilize internal dynamics to support social connection.

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.

What we develop

HABEMO: an innovative haptic tool for investigating the bodily representation of mental states in individuals with visual impairmentsLettieri, Calce, Collignon
Progress in Brain Research, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/bs.pbr.2025.02.001

Our novel haptic paradigm allows the mapping of emotions in the body in an intuitive way, offering a more inclusive and versatile method for exploring how people connect their emotions to their physical experiences. The haptic version of our task holds particular promise for investigating how individuals with limited or no visual capability maintain representations of emotional and cognitive states within their bodies. In addition to its profound implications for understanding emotions, this innovative tool holds promise for exploring a wide variety of research questions beyond the realm of affective states, thereby broadening its utility as a versatile instrument for investigating various aspects of human perception, cognition, and embodiment particularly within the context of visual impairment.