Mental heartbeat tracking and rating of emotional pictures are not related

Our aim was to conceptually replicate the findings of previous empirical studies showing that people with higher cardiac interoceptive accuracy experience more intense emotions. Apart of the mental heartbeat tracking task of Schandry, Hungarian (n = 46, 76.0% female, mean age 22.28 ± 2.228) and Norwegian (n = 50, 60.0% female, mean age 24.66 ± 3.048) participants rated the arousal and valence evoked by positive, neutral and negative pictures. Multivariate repeated analysis of variance (applying both frequentist and Bayesian approaches) did not reveal any connection between heartbeat perception scores and the subjective ratings (i.e., arousal and valence) of the pictures in any of the two groups. The lack of the expected association between cardioceptive accuracy and arousal might partly be explained by the methodological differences between previous studies and this one; for example, we did not split or preselected the sample based on the performance on the Schandry task and applied a relatively strict instruction (i.e., by encouraging to count felt heartbeats only, and to report zero if no sensations were detected). SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00426-021-01593-4.