Emotional Egocentricity Bias is modulated by implicit expectations of interpersonal emotional contingencies and perceptual noise

Emotional Egocentricity Bias (EEB) refers to the tendency to project one’s own emotional state onto others. While previous research has demonstrated EEB in multiple paradigms, its underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Across two studies, we used a novel dual-task paradigm to examine how fluctuations in expected interpersonal emotional contingencies (IEC) and perceptual ambiguity shape EEB. In each trial, participants underwent an implicit emotion induction through a roulette game and subsequently categorized an ambiguous facial expression. Experimental blocks varied in the probability of emotion congruency between self and other. Behavioural results showed that implicit congruency expectations modulated EEB as accuracy was highest for congruent trials in neutral and congruent blocks but reversed in incongruent blocks, indicating implicit adaptation to IEC. Interestingly, higher perceptual noise improved performance and amplified contextual effects, suggesting that EEB is jointly shaped by interpersonal predictive processing and sensory noise. To model individual learning of IEC, we employed Hierarchical Gaussian Filters (HGF), revealing that participants updated their beliefs about IEC in a volatility-sensitive manner and that decisions were primarily based on posterior beliefs. Learning parameters were associated with interoceptive sensibility dimensions, particularly emotional awareness and body listening. Heart rate acceleration following outcomes was linked to belief updates, suggesting that arousal influences socio-emotional learning. These findings show that EEB reflects context-sensitive inferences shaped by internal states and perceived uncertainty and highlight the role of interoception in adaptive emotion recognition. This work adds to our understanding of EEB offering insights for future studies on embodied emotion perception in dynamic social contexts.