Frontiers in Psychology
October 28, 2026
Michela Balconi, Valentina Cardella, Richard Leighton Greene et al.
Qualia have played a key role in the development of a science of consciousness. They brought into focus the question of whether explaining the availability of information for reasoning, verbal report, and the control of action would suffice to explain conscious experience. A science confined to access consciousness would have to justify that restriction and explain what became of the...
Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience
April 1, 2025
Davide Crivelli, Michela Balconi
7 citations
The ability to attend to and consciously process interoceptive signals is deemed critical for the development of minimal self, adaptive self-regulation and affective experience, and optimal expression of both instrumental and executive cognitive functions. Yet, notwithstanding the richness of theoretical proposals concerning inferential accounts of interoception, empirical evidence is still...
Applied Sciences
December 8, 2017
Michela Balconi, Giulia Fronda, Irene Venturella et al.
69 citations
Conscious, pre-conscious, and unconscious mechanisms are implicated in modulating affective processing in daily activities. Specifically, mental practice fostering awareness and control of affective reactions to external stimuli and stressful events (such as mindfulness and neurofeedback protocols) can be used to improve our ability to manage unconscious negative emotions. Indeed, it is...
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
2017
Davide Crivelli, Michela Balconi
According to philosophy of mind and neuroscientific models, the sense of agency can be defined as the sense that I am the one that is generating an action and causing its effects. Such ability to sense ourselves as causal agents is critical for the definition of intentional behavior and is a primary root for human interaction skills. The present mini-review aims at discussing evidences from...
Neuropsychological Trends
April 1, 2012
Michela Balconi
Neuropsychological studies have underlined the significant presence of distinct brain correlates deputed to analyze facial expression of emotion. It was observed that some cerebral circuits were considered as specific for emotional face comprehension as a function of conscious vs. unconscious processing of emotional information. Moreover, the emotional content of faces (i.e. positive vs....