Psychology Seminar Series: Bodily contribution to social perception

Dr Alex Sel presents her talk on 'Bodily contribution to social perception'

Research in human psychology and neuroscience has traditionally focused on behavioural and brain responses to stimuli in the environment ignoring the unarguable fact that the brain is part of the body. Indeed, the human brain has the remarkable ability to perceive information coming from the body – sensorimotor and interoceptive information, and to integrate this bodily information with external signals to guide behaviour.

In this talk Dr Sel will present a series of EEG investigations that highlight the key role of somatosensory and cardiac interoceptive signals in processes such as emotion understanding, self-perception and learning. She will also present a series of neurostimulation studies that examine the causal contribution of bodily related motor areas to action control.

Speaker

Dr Alex Sel is one of the newest members of the Department of Psychology at the University of Essex. Her research is focused on understanding how sensory and motor signals coming from within and outside the body influence our social behaviours. She is particularly interested in how the human brain forms representations of affective states through bodily interoceptive signals, and how it leverages these representations to guide actions.

Dr Sel completed her PhD in electrophysiology of emotion and language processing at the University Complutense of Madrid before pursuing a postdoctoral position at Royal Hollway University London investigating the neural dynamics underpinning embodiment of emotion and self-processing. She then moved to the Oxford University to work on a personal research grant investigating the brain mechanisms underlying social and action control.

She joined the Department of Psychology at Essex in June 2019.