Dr. Paula C. Salamone

About my research

My research focuses on understanding how brain-body interactions shape affective experience, self-awareness, and mental health.

One line of my work investigates interoception, the perception of internal bodily signals, and its role in emotion, bodily self-awareness, and psychopathology. I study how interoceptive processes are altered in conditions such as schizophrenia, neurodegenerative disorders, and following cardiac transplantation, as well as their contribution to treatment responses.

A second line of research examines social-affective touch as a mechanism for emotional regulation, social bonding, and the construction of the bodily self. I investigate how touch influences affective processing and how these processes may be disrupted in conditions characterized by altered self-experience, such as depersonalization and schizophrenia.

My research combines behavioral experiments, psychophysiology, electroencephalography (EEG), and neuroimaging techniques, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to investigate brain-body communication across healthy and clinical populations.