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ItemEmpathic Effects of Auditory Heartbeats: A Neurophysiological Investigation(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020-04-22) Winters, Raymond MichaelI hypothesized that hearing the heartbeat of another person would affect listeners’ empathic state, and designed an experiment to measure changes in behavior and cardiac neurophysiology. In my experiment, participants (N = 27) completed modified versions of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task (RMET) in different auditory heartbeat conditions (slow, fast, silence, audio-only). For each trial, participants completed two measures of empathic state: cognitive (“What is this person feeling?”) and affective (“How well could you feel what they were feeling?”). From my results, I found that the presence of auditory heartbeats i) changed cognitive empathy and ii) increased affective empathy, and these responses depended on the heartbeat tempo. I also analyzed two markers of cardiac neurophysiology: i) Heart Rate (HR) and ii) the Heartbeat-Evoked Potential (HEP). I found that the auditory heartbeat decreased listeners’ HR, and there were additional effects due to tempo and affective empathy. Finally, a frontal component of the HEP was more negative in the time-range of 350-500ms, which I attribute to a decrease in cardiac attention (i.e. “interoception”) when listening empathically to the heartbeat of others.