People Can Tell How Fast Your Heart Is Beating Just by Looking at You

By Shayla Love in Vice (2022)

A preprint paper, published online on March 29, replicated the finding that people can guess another’s heartbeat just by looking at them. The researchers, with first author Irena Arslanova, did an additional measurement: They also looked to see how well people did at assessing their own heart rate, or their interoceptive accuracy. This is often done by asking people to count their own heartbeats without taking their pulse, and then comparing what they felt to a measure of how many times their heart beat.