zzxxzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzExtroversion and Reward sensitivity:
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Extraversion is consistently linked to greater sensitivity to positive or rewarding stimuli (Depue
and Collins, 1999; Lucas et al., 2000). Extraverts report more positive affect while watching
funny films (Gross et al., 1998; Morrone et al., 2000), imagining themselves in happy events
(Larsen and Ketelaar, 1991), and in a variety of other situations (Lucas and Fujita, 2000).
However, there is disagreement over whether extraverts respond more strongly than introverts
to all classes of rewarding stimuli generally, or more specifically to social rewards (Diener et
al., 1984; Lucas et al., 2000; Lucas and Diener, 2001; Ashton et al., 2002).
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Extraversion has also been linked with negative emotional responding, although findings have
been considerably more mixed. Most researchers note little relationship with negative affect,
which is more strongly associated with neuroticism (Diener et al., 1984; Gross et al., 1998).
Others have found extraversion to be associated with decreased experience of negative affect.
Extraverts experience less negative affect during sad films (Lischetzke and Eid, 2006) and when
imagining themselves in unpleasant situations (Larsen and Ketelaar, 1991), and report lower
levels of negative mood across the day than introverts (Stewart et al., 2005).
Extroversion and Sensitivity to External Stimuli
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extroverts
Neurobiological underpinnings
Research into the neurobiological aspects of these personality types highlights significant
differences in brain activity. Introverts typically show increased blood flow to areas associated
with memory and problem-solving, such as the frontal lobe. They also exhibit higher resting
cortical arousal, which may make them more sensitive to external stimuli. This heightened
sensitivity can lead to feeling overwhelmed in busy environments, necessitating periods of
solitude to recharge. Extroverts, however, demonstrate more robust responses to dopamine, a
neurotransmitter linked to reward and enjoyment, leading them to seek out more stimulating
social interactions.
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Fu (2013) found that the neurotransmitter dopamine (a chemical that turns on the reward and
pleasure-seeking part of the brain) reacts differently in introvert’s and extrovert’s brains. In
extroverts, they found a stronger dopamine response to rewards, so they experience more
frequent activation of strong positive emotions.
Kehoe, Toomey, Balsters and Bokde (2012) used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
to investigate cortical arousal in introverts and extroverts.
They found that introverts tended to become stimulated very easily, whereas extroverts had
lower levels of cortical arousal.
This can explain why extroverts may need to have more external stimulation as they can
become easily bored. Gale et al, (2001) asked their participants to emphasize with positive and
negative facial expressions and measured their responses using an electroencephalogram (EEG).
They also found a higher frequency of cortical arousal in introverts than extroverts. This
evidence supports Eysenck’s theory that extroverts, and introverts have varying levels of cortical
arousal.
Another study which used fMRI on participants completing cognitive tasks has shown that
extroversion is associated with activations in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, middle temporal
gyrus, and the amygdala – areas associated with memory, attention, and emotional response
(Lei, Yang & Wu, 2015).
Hans Eysenck
Hans Eysenck (1947; 1966; 1967) constructed a theory of personality which has a biological
basis. He believed that personality was the result of biological differences in individuals’ nervous
systems which ultimately affect their ability to learn and adapt to the environment.
Eysenck proposed that personality could be represented by three dimensions:
Introversion/Extroversion (E)
Neuroticism/Stability (N)
Psychoticism/Normality (P)
Eysenck asserted that each personality trait can be traced back to a different biological cause,
particularly that personality is dependent on a balance between excitation and inhibition of
the autonomic nervous system.
Eysenck (1967) also claimed that differences in behavioral extroversion and introversion are the
result of differences in the brain.
He explained that extroverts tend to seek excitement and social activity to raise their naturally
low cortical arousal levels, whereas introverts tend to avoid social situations to minimize their
already high cortical arousal levels.
Extroversion and ER
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selfcontrol-and-managing-emotions-among-undergraduate-and-postgraduate-students
The findings revealed that individuals with lower levels of extraversion exhibited significantly
lower levels of self-control and emotion management, whereas those with higher extraversion
demonstrated stronger emotional regulation abilities. This study supports the findings of Taneja
et al. (2020), who reported a strong positive relationship between extraversion and EI among
medical students. These results suggest that the development of emotional control is influenced
by personality traits and that social conditioning during formative years plays a critical role in
cultivating self-regulatory skills.
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It has been established that individuals with strongly expressed attributes of introversion are
less capable to understand and control emotions of other people, i.e. it is presumptive that
their overall EI level is lower. And conversely, higher EI while understanding other people and
being able to influence their behavior is demonstrated by extroverted individuals. Conclusion. It
is plausible that better abilities of extroverts may be explained by the fact that information of
emotional type stimulates them while abundant emotional information has an opposite
effect on introverts – it disorganizes thinking, unbalances decisions, etc. The obtained data
may be useful in making psychological intervention more efficient.
IA and Exteroceptive Awareness (SPS)
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Correlation and regression analyses revealed that meta-cognitive interoceptive awareness was
specifically and negatively related to the exteroceptively mediated malleability of body
experiences. These results indicate that the perception of the self being located within one’s
body relies on the interaction of exteroceptive input and higher-order interoceptive abilities.
However, interoception, defined as the processing of inner physiological signals, represents
another important source for an individual’s body representation. Interoception has been linked
to a variety of psychological functions, such as emotion processing (e.g., Craig, 2004), social
cognition (e.g., Ferri et al., 2013), or self-awareness (e.g., Ainley et al., 2012).
Remarkably, the perceptual processes underlying bodily self-location can be easily manipulated
by the application of unusual multimodal exteroceptive input (Ehrsson, 2007). In this kind of
experiment, the participant wears a head-mounted display transmitting a streaming video signal
recorded by a camera placed behind the subject.
or example, there is evidence that the higher-order dimension of interoceptive awareness is a
particular indicator of interoceptive abilities across organ-specific axes, such as cardiac and
respiratory modalities (Garfinkel et al., 2016a). Thus, it is likely that relating these different
measures of interoception to bodily self-location might reveal new insights into the underlying
mechanisms
Discussion
Bodily self-consciousness is composed of three key components, perceptually reflected by the
sensation of having a body that (a) belongs to one’s self (self-identification), (b) is the locus from
where an individual is experiencing the world (first-person perspective), and (c) is experienced
as occupying a specific location in space (self-location; Blanke, 2012). These dimensions of
bodily self-consciousness are tightly interlinked (Huang et al., 2017) and can be mediated by
exteroception and/or interoception (e.g., Aspell et al., 2012, 2013). The experience of one’s self
being located within one’s body, as assessed in the present study, represents the “normal”
perceptual consequence of these processes. Both exteroceptive (Ehrsson, 2007; Lenggenhager
et al., 2007) and interoceptive (Adler et al., 2014) processes have been identified as specifically
contributing to the co-location of the body and the self.
This indicates that better metacognitive interoceptive awareness is accompanied by a body
percept that is less prone to being malleable by exteroceptive input. In other words, such
participants’ perceptual systems rely more on higher-order interoceptive processes rather than
on exteroception, resulting in a more stable body representation. The results also remained
significant if we focused on the significant perspective × stimulation effect on out-of-body
experiences, suggesting that dislocation, rather than co-location, is particularly relying on
metacognitive interoceptive capabilities. These results are of importance for theoretical
conceptions about bodily self-consciousness, as well as for the understanding of
psychopathologies characterized by aberrant connections between the body and the self.
This study adds to the existing empirical evidence that links the malleability of bodily self-
consciousness to interoceptive abilities (e.g., Tsakiris et al., 2011; Adler et al., 2014). While the
integration of sensory information across exteroceptive and interoceptive domains has
previously been shown to modulate bodily self-consciousness (Suzuki et al., 2013),
Most importantly, our results indicate that higher-order, metacognitive interoceptive awareness,
rather than behavioral performance on interoceptive accuracy or interoceptive sensibility,
predicts the malleability of the bodily self-location. Interoceptive awareness, compared to the
other interoceptive dimensions, seems to be a particularly reliable indicator of one’s own bodily
states, since previous findings revealed that interoceptive awareness—in contrast to
interoceptive accuracy—represents a relatively stable trait across physiological modalities
(Garfinkel et al., 2016a). Thus, this particular interoceptive dimension might also play a role in
the stability (or malleability) of body representations: the more reliable the information is
from my body and the more I am aware of this reliability, the less dependent my perceptual
system is on exteroceptive information
. There is growing evidence that disturbed interoception may be important for dysfunctions in
several conditions of disordered mental health (Khalsa et al., 2018). For example, borderline
personality disorder patients, who frequently report dissociative body perceptions (Löffler et al.,
2020), have been characterized by both abnormal integration of multimodal sensory input
(Bekrater-Bodmann et al., 2016) and disturbed neural representation of interoceptive signals
(Müller et al., 2015). Accordingly, interoceptive abilities, particularly interoceptive awareness,
have been proposed to play an etiological role in the development of this disorder (Löffler et al.,
2018), probably via repeated invalidation experiences in early life. Further, recent studies
suggest that discrepancies between interoceptive processing and beliefs about, or
interpretation of, interoceptive signals might reflect body awareness and affective deficits in
individuals with autism spectrum disorder (Garfinkel et al., 2016b; Shah et al., 2016). In this
group, aberrant interoception has also been linked to proneness to the rubber hand illusion
(Schauder et al., 2015), suggesting that an impaired interplay between exteroception,
interoception, and the malleability of the body percept plays a role for certain
psychopathologies characterized by disturbed self-representation. We propose that disturbed
integration of interoceptive and exteroceptive inputs is potentially linked to higher cognitive
functions, which may be the basis of abnormal (bodily) self-processing. Thus, therapeutic
treatments for these disorders could consider techniques, such as mindfulness-based
interventions, that focus not only on the ability to correctly attend to body signals but also on
the change of metacognitive representations and related cognitions (Khalsa et al., 2018).
Prospective studies could investigate whether interoceptive awareness might be trained in such
settings and whether improvement would be accompanied by reductions in the frequency or
intensity of aberrant body experiences.
So because introverts have high SPS, so they are more sensitive to external stimuli, so they
might be more in-need of increasing their IA to regulate this.
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That interoceptive and exteroceptive processes interact in forming the sense of bodily self is
further illustrated by research showing that the extent to which individuals experience the
rubber hand illusion depends on their interoceptive awareness. Thus people who are more
accurately aware of their internal body signals, are less prone to both the rubber hand illusion
(Tsakiris, Tajadura-Jiménez, & Costantini, 2011) and the ‘enfacement illusion’ (Tajadura-Jiménez
et al., 2012, Tajadura-Jiménez and Tsakiris, in press), implying that individuals with low
interoceptive awareness might have a more malleable mental representation of the self in
response to exteroceptive signals.
The role of exteroceptive and interoceptive awareness in executing socially relevant bodily
actions: A naturalistic investigation of greeting behaviour in the UK and Spain
These relationships suggest that IA facilitates healthy social approach behaviour as expressed
through greetings, irrespective of cultural greeting differences.
A second aim of our study was to investigate the role of interoceptive awareness (IA) in
displaying greeting competency and intimacy. Interoceptive awareness is concerned with the
sensing of internal bodily signals such as heart rate, breathing, and gastrointestinal functions.
Higher order dimensions of IA further include the appraisal, integration, and regulation of
internal bodily signals, all of which promote a sense of wellbeing within one’s body (Chen et al.,
2021; Mehling et al., 2012, 2018). Sensations of internal bodily signals affect motor coordination
(Mehling et al., 2009), and may therefore contribute to the competency and intimacy of
greeting behaviour. Good IA reinforces the experience of being ‘at home in one’s body’ (Mehling
et al., 2012, 2018), thus serving as an important internal information channel to enhance self-
awareness (Craig, 2010). The feeling of an embodied self is operationalised by the integration
of multi-dimensional internal bodily signals with external, sensory information, resulting in a
stable sense of body representation (Bekrater-Bodmann et al., 2020; Herbert & Pollatos,
2012). The integration of internal and external bodily sensations is positively related to social
approach behaviour (Ardizzi & Ferri, 2018; Ferri et al., 2013) and therefore well-suited to explain
non-verbal greetings that rely on physical closeness and bodily touch. Ferri et al. (2013) found a
positive relationship between interoceptive cardiac awareness and people’s autonomic
response in a social setting involving human touch within a close peripersonal space. In this
study, an experimenter’s hand performed caressing movements, either touching or simulating
the caressing touches at various distances from the participant’s hand. Autonomic responses,
measured using Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia, were significantly higher in participants with high
but not low IA when the touch simulations were performed at a 20 cm distance, i.e. at the
boundary of interpersonal space. Following the author’s interpretations, this indicates that
individuals with high IA
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In other words, it seems that people with low interoceptive skills are also harder to engage in
social interactions. They actually respond to the presence of another, provided that the other is
very near to their own body. Based on previous literature on cardiac interoceptive sensitivity, at
least two possible hypotheses can be formulated to elucidate these results. The first hypothesis
refers to the evidence provided by Matthias and colleagues [83] that interoceptive awareness is
positively related to the attentional processing of external visual stimuli. Thus, good heartbeat
perceivers would be also more able to focus on behaviourally relevant information guiding
adaptive strategies. The second hypothesis concerns the interaction between interoceptive
sensitivity and body-representations [15]. High interoceptive sensitivity reduces the malleability
of the multisensory representation of one' s body contributing to a more efficient processing of
visuo-tactile body-related information occurring in close peripersonal space. As a consequence,
interoceptive sensitivity might contribute to define safe social distances [84] and to judge the
limits of a safe social space.
On the relationship between interoceptive awareness and the attentional processing of visual
stimuli (Matthias et al., 2009)
A study by Matthias et al. (2009) revealed that interoceptive awareness might play a crucial role
in the processing of external stimuli.
Recently, researchers have identified an interest in the role of cognitive factors such as attention
in interoceptive awareness processes. A study by Pollatos et al. (2007) identified a positive
association between interoceptive awareness and a main component relating to attentive
processing pertaining to visual cues. Moreover, an fMRI revealed that the parietal context which
plays a role in mediating selective attention towards external environmental stimuli was found
to also play a role in directing attention towards one’s internal visceral experiences such as
focusing on specific bodily cues Tracy et al. (2007). Moreover, Gregory et al. (2003) investigated
the interaction between selective and divided attention with the processing of internal bodily
sensations. Results revealed that attention impacted the processing of internal bodily cues
which was revealed through activations in the cognitive and sensory networks comprised of the
primary as well as secondary sensory cortex, anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal cortices.
These brain structures have also been revealed to have an important impact on attentional
processes not only involved in interoception, but for processing external stimuli as well of any
kind. In addition, a study revealed that focused and divided attention activated regions in the
brain such as the thalamus, prefrontal cortex, insular cortex, and the anterior cingulate cortex,
brain structures that were also activated when participants had to be engaged in the perception
of internal cues (or interoceptive awareness). As such, Matthias et al. (2009) sought to
investigate whether the ability for an individual to focus their attention on internal somatic cues
could also be associated with their ability to attend to external stimuli. In turn, findings
revealed that interoceptive awareness might play a crucial role in the processing of external
stimuli.
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