Editorial: Physical and psychological proximity in humans: From the body to the mind and vice-versa

their article, Peters et al., (2022), redefined different types of stress by specifying their internal bodily correlates. They identified a "good stress", a "tolerable stress", and a "toxic stress". In "good stress" humans adopt the most adequate response to face the stressful stimulus, in order to reduce the uncertainty or environmental "entropy" (for the notion of Free Energy Principle see Friston 2006;Friston 2010) and it is usually associated with cerebral insulin suppression, brain-induced ketogenesis, and brain-induced heart rate acceleration. The "tolerable stress", consisting of the habituation to stressful situations by flattening/broading our own goals, leads to a reduction of arousal and hormonal responses. Finally, in the case of "toxic stress", people manifest a permanent brain energy-consuming arousal state during the day and the lack of brain energy-saving deep sleep at night which contribute to the overall increase in total brain energy consumption. In particular, the authors suggested how some physiological conditions caused by a maladaptation to chronic stress might be at the origin of metabolic dysregulation, such as Type 2 diabetes mellitus and obesity. Thus, internal bodily signals appear to also reflect how humans interact with the environment.The environment can be perceived as more or less stressful and aversive across time and circumstance. One prominent example is social proximity before and during the Covid-19 situation. Before the pandemic, being physically closer to friends and family was often considered a source of pleasure and reassurance, whereas during peaks of infection, it was a reason for anxiety and distress. Scerrati et al., (2022), provided evidence of the flexibility of categorization processes during the unfolding of events and based on interindividual differences (Fini et al., 2021). In detail, they showed, through an affective priming paradigm, that those who evaluated social proximity as positive processed positive words preceded by images of social proximity faster, while the contrary applied to individuals evaluating social proximity as negative. Although interoceptive signals were not directly measured, these results highlight how an internal emotional state affects the perception of socially relevant information.Until now we underlined the entanglement among internal bodily signals, bodily awareness, cognitive processes, human-environment interaction, and the processing of socially relevant information. Ultimately, it is worth mentioning the impact of interoceptive signals on human-human interactions. Indeed, the autonomic nervous system may play a crucial role also in regulating individuals' ability to coordinate and adapt to others' behavior (Thayer et al., 2009) during interpersonal interactions. In these contexts, where two or more individuals coordinate their actions, thoughts, or words, and continuously predict, monitor, and adapt to each other's behavior (Vesper et al., 2010;Boukarras et al., 2021Era et al., 2022;Sacheli et al., 2022;Moreau et al., 2020;Hale et al., 2020), the study of interpersonal autonomic physiology has gained attention. Research on this phenomenon, conceptualized as the relationship between pairs or groups of individuals' physiological dynamics, has shown how interacting with others results in interpersonal synchrony in cardiac (Danyluck & Page-Gould, 2019), electrodermal (Zeevi et al., 2022) and respiratory (Müller & Lindenberger, 2011) signals. More importantly, interpersonal synchrony appears to be associated with the quality of the interactions (Czeszumski et al., 2022;Palumbo et al., 2017). In this regard, Boukarras and colleagues (2022), shed light on the utility to capture interpersonal synergies and dynamics, also indexed by the relationship between two or more individuals' internal bodily signals, to investigate human interactions inside working environments (i.e. Organizational Neuroscience). Taken together, the studies presented here point to the importance of exploring the internal bodily processing in tight interrelation with the subjective and intersubjective dimensions of human behaviors, cognitive functioning, and social interaction, across scales and contexts, ranging from the simplest processes of self-awareness to the most complex social structures.

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