Theory of Motivated Cue-Integration and COVID-19: Between Interoception, Somatization, and Radicalization.

The global dissemination of COVID-19 creates confusion and ambiguity in nearly every aspect of life, including fear of contagion, heightened awareness of the mortality of self and family members, lack of power, and distrust of experts and decision-makers. In this stressful situation, the question arises as to what mechanisms distinguish between adaptive and maladaptive self-regulation. The theory of Motivated Cue-Integration (MCI) is a novel theory of self-regulation that provides a new perspective on the effect of COVID-19 on self-regulation deficiency as an example of psychological distress.

Motivated Cue-Integration and Emotion Regulation: Awareness of the Association Between Interoceptive and Exteroceptive Embodied Cues and Personal Need Creates an Emotion Goal.

Research on emotion suggests that individuals regulate their emotions to attain hedonic or instrumental goals. However, little is known of emotion regulation under low emotional clarity. The theory of motivated cue integration (MCI) suggests that emotion regulation under low emotional clarity should be understood as dissociation between a high-level individual hierarchical system of goals and low level interoceptive and exteroceptive embodied cues.

Motivated Cue Integration in Alexithymia: Improving Interoception and Emotion Information Processing by Awareness-of-Sensation Techniques.

Recent findings indicate that alexithymia is the result of a multidomain, multidimensional failure of interoception. Whereas much of the literature addresses the cognitive and affective aspects of alexithymia, less is known about the association between the failure of interoception and the process of motivated cue integration. The theory of motivated cue integration integrates high-level control processes with low-level embodied and contextual cues, suggesting that selective attention to internal and contextual cues results in the creation of meaning that, in turn, influences judgment and action generation.

Keep it cool: temperature priming effect on cognitive control.

The effect of physical temperature on cognition and behavior has been the focus of extensive research in recent years, demonstrating that embodied concepts are grounded in, and shaped by, sensorimotor physical experiences. Nevertheless, less is known about how experienced and perceived temperatures affect cognitive control, one of humans core executive functions. In the present work, we primed participants with cool versus warm temperature using a between participants manipulation of physical touch experience (Experiment 1), and a within participants manipulation of seeing landscape views associated with cool vs.

On the association between loneliness and physical warmth-seeking through bathing: reply to Donnellan et al. (2014) and three further replications of Bargh and Shalev (2012) study 1.

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 15(1) of Emotion (see record 2015-05076-005). In the article, there was an error in the abstract. The name of author Donnellan was misspelled as Donellan.

Use of Priming-Based Interventions to Facilitate Psychological Health: Commentary on Kazdin and Blase (2011).

Whereas traditional psychological interventions have been conceptualized in terms of deliberate readiness for change (Prochaska & DiClemente, 1983), emerging findings from social psychology suggest that regulation of behavior can operate independently of conscious selection and guidance (Bargh & Morsella, 2010). This evidence has come from studies using priming techniques based on activation of relevant mental representations by external environmental stimuli (Bargh & Chartrand, 2000). Research on automatic interpersonal processes has shown that feeling of social warmth (Bargh & Shalev, 2011; Williams & Bargh, 2008a) and the regulation of maladaptive emotions (Williams, Bargh, Nocera, & Gray, 2009), for example, can be induced nonconsciously by physical sensations, visual images or semantic concepts.

The substitutability of physical and social warmth in daily life.

Classic and contemporary research on person perception has demonstrated the paramount importance of interpersonal warmth. Recent research on embodied cognition has shown that feelings of social warmth or coldness can be induced by experiences of physical warmth or coldness, and vice versa. Here we show that people tend to self-regulate their feelings of social warmth through applications of physical warmth, apparently without explicit awareness of doing so.