Séminaire interne : Gwenhi PARK

From Aristotle to contemporary neuroscience, scholars have long recognized a close connection between the heart and the brain in shaping human emotion and behavior. Modern research formalizes this intuition through the Neurovisceral Integration Model (Thayer & Lane, 2000, 2009), which proposes that heart rate variability (HRV)—an index of cardiac vagal tone—reflects the functional integrity of neural systems that support emotional, cognitive, and autonomic self-regulation.

In this talk, Dr. Park will present an integrated research program examining how individual differences in resting HRV relate to the dynamic interplay between emotion and cognition across a wide range of cognitive processes and domains of social cognition, including social identity and moral judgment. Drawing on behavioral, psychophysiological, and cognitive approaches, she will highlight three interrelated lines of inquiry:

1.     how HRV shapes cognition–emotion interactions across distinct stages of information processing;

2.     how HRV modulates social cognition, including group-based attentional biases and moral judgment; and

3.     how social-cognitive biases emerge in individuals with elevated anxiety and depressive symptoms.

Dr. Park will also discuss recent projects investigating whether HRV moderates spatial attention to racial in-group and out-group faces, evaluative processing in the context of social identity cues, the influence of moral judgment on attention and memory, and the efficiency of implicit learning. Together, this work highlights the central role of physiological self-regulation in shaping how we process emotionally, socially, and morally relevant information.