Insights into interoceptive and emotional processing: Lessons from studies on insular HD-tDCS.

Interoception, the processing of internal bodily signals, is proposed as the fundamental mechanism underlying emotional experiences. Interoceptive and emotional processing appear distorted in psychiatric disorders. However, our understanding of the neural structures involved in both processes remains limited.

Internal states and interoception along a spectrum of eating disorder symptomology.

Objective: Recent studies on atypical interoceptive capabilities have focused on clinical populations, including anorexia nervosa[1,2]. The present exploratory study aims to characterize the influence of disordered eating symptomology on interoceptive capabilities in college students, a population for which dangerous dieting behaviors may emerge.

Method: Ninety-nine participants were randomized to consume a blinded high calorie or low calorie midday shake.

Gastric interoception and gastric myoelectrical activity in bulimia nervosa and binge-eating disorder.

Objective: Identifying factors that control food intake is crucial to the understanding and treatment of eating disorders characterized by binge eating. In healthy individuals, stomach distension plays an important role in the development of satiation, but gastric sensations might be overridden in binge eating. The present study investigated the perception of gastric signals (i.

Preoccupied with the body: mild stress amplifies the relation between rumination and interoception.

Classic and modern emotion theories suggest that the perception of bodily sensations, or interoception, is foundational to emotion processing. The present research examined whether interoception is enhanced among people high in ruminative tendencies, especially under stress. To test this notion, the present research examined the effects of a mild stressor on subjective and objective measures of interoception among people varying in ruminative tendencies.

Comment on "Zamariola et al. (2018), Interoceptive Accuracy Scores are Problematic: Evidence from Simple Bivariate Correlations"-The empirical data base, the conceptual reasoning and the analysis behind this statement are misconceived and do not support the authors' conclusions.

A recent paper by Zamariola and colleagues is widely cited as an authority on the invalidity of the Heartbeat Counting Task as a measure of interoceptive accuracy. Given the widespread interest in this field, it is essential that papers about methods are conceptually sound. However, only one of the authors' four criticisms appears substantiated - that people count too few heartbeats.

Investigating Multidimensional Interoceptive Awareness in a Japanese Population: Validation of the Japanese MAIA-J.

The Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) is a self-report instrument to assess relevant dimensions of bodily awareness. The aim of this study was to offer a Japanese version and adaptation of the MAIA (MAIA-J), as well as to analyse its psychometric properties in a Japanese population. The English MAIA was systematically forward and backward translated by bi-lingual Japanese experts; additionally, content validity aspects regarding language were discussed by a panel of experts.

Changes in interoceptive processes following brain stimulation.

The processing and perception of individual internal bodily signals (interoception) has been differentiated to comprise different levels and processes involved. The so-called heartbeat-evoked potential (HEP) offers an additional possibility to examine automatic processing of cardiac signals. Knowledge on neural structures potentially supporting different facets of interoception is still sparse.

Atypical Self-Focus Effect on Interoceptive Accuracy in Anorexia Nervosa.

: Interoceptive abilities are known to be affected in anorexia nervosa (AN). Previous studies could show that private self-focus can enhance interoceptive accuracy (IAcc) in healthy participants. As body dissatisfaction is high in AN, confrontation with bodily features such as the own face might have a directly opposed effect in AN.

The Water Load Test As a Measure of Gastric Interoception: Development of a Two-Stage Protocol and Application to a Healthy Female Population.

The sensitivity for one's own internal body signals (i.e., interoception) has been demonstrated to play an important role in the pathogenesis of eating and weight disorders.

German version of the intuitive eating scale: Psychometric evaluation and application to an eating disordered population.

Intuitive eating has been described to represent an adaptive eating behaviour that is characterised by eating in response to physiological hunger and satiety cues, rather than situational and emotional stimuli. The Intuitive Eating Scale-2 (IES-2) has been developed to measure such attitudes and behaviours on four subscales: unconditional permission to eat (UPE), eating for physical rather than emotional reasons (EPR), reliance on internal hunger and satiety cues (RHSC), and body-food choice congruence (B-FCC). The present study aimed at validating the psychometric properties of the German translation of the IES-2 in a large German-speaking sample.

Electrophysiological evidence for an attentional bias in processing body stimuli in bulimia nervosa.

Empirical evidence suggests abnormalities in the processing of body stimuli in bulimia nervosa (BN). This study investigated central markers of processing body stimuli by means of event-related potentials in BN. EEG was recorded from 20 women with BN and 20 matched healthy controls while watching and evaluating underweight, normal and overweight female body pictures.

Differential changes in self-reported aspects of interoceptive awareness through 3 months of contemplative training.

Interoceptive body awareness (IA) is crucial for psychological well-being and plays an important role in many contemplative traditions. However, until recently, standardized self-report measures of IA were scarce, not comprehensive, and the effects of interoceptive training on such measures were largely unknown. The Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) questionnaire measures IA with eight different scales.

Attenuated interoceptive sensitivity in overweight and obese individuals.

Objective: Perceiving internal signals of hunger and satiety is related to the regulation of food intake. Recent data suggest that interoception (perception of bodily signals) and interoceptive sensitivity (sensitivity for internal signals) might be a crucial variable for the regulation of behavior associated with feelings of satiety. It is yet unclear whether interoceptive sensitivity is altered in overweight and obese participants.

Startling sweet temptations: hedonic chocolate deprivation modulates experience, eating behavior, and eyeblink startle.

Many individuals restrict their food intake to prevent weight gain. This restriction has both homeostatic and hedonic effects but their relative contribution is currently unclear. To isolate hedonic effects of food restriction, we exposed regular chocolate eaters to one week of chocolate deprivation but otherwise regular eating.

Eat your troubles away: electrocortical and experiential correlates of food image processing are related to emotional eating style and emotional state.

Emotional eating, a trait-like style of food intake in response to negative emotion states, represents an important aspect of overeating and eating related psychopathology. The mechanisms of emotional eating both on experiential and neuronal levels are not well delineated. We recorded event related potentials (ERPs) while individuals with high or low emotional eating style (HEE, n=25; LEE, n=20) viewed and rated pictures of high-caloric food during neutral state vs.

Sensitivity and specificity of hypnosis effects on gastric myoelectrical activity.

Objectives: The effects of hypnosis on physiological (gastrointestinal) functions are incompletely understood, and it is unknown whether they are hypnosis-specific and gut-specific, or simply unspecific effects of relaxation.

Design: Sixty-two healthy female volunteers were randomly assigned to either a single session of hypnotic suggestion of ingesting an appetizing meal and an unappetizing meal, or to relax and concentrate on having an appetizing or unappetizing meal, while the electrogastrogram (EGG) was recorded. At the end of the session, participants drank water until they felt full, in order to detect EGG-signal changes after ingestion of a true gastric load.

Intuitive eating is associated with interoceptive sensitivity. Effects on body mass index.

Intuitive eating is relevant for adaptive eating, body weight and well-being and impairments are associated with dieting and eating disorders. It is assumed to depend on the ability to recognize one's signs of hunger and fullness and to eat accordingly. This suggests a link to the individual ability to perceive and processes bodily signals (interoceptive sensitivity, IS) which has been shown to be associated with emotion processing and behavior regulation.

On the embodiment of emotion regulation: interoceptive awareness facilitates reappraisal.

The ability to cognitively regulate emotional responses to aversive events is essential for mental and physical health. One prerequisite of successful emotion regulation is the awareness of emotional states, which in turn is associated with the awareness of bodily signals [interoceptive awareness (IA)]. This study investigated the neural dynamics of reappraisal of emotional responses in 28 participants who differed with respect to IA.

Interoception across modalities: on the relationship between cardiac awareness and the sensitivity for gastric functions.

The individual sensitivity for ones internal bodily signals ("interoceptive awareness") has been shown to be of relevance for a broad range of cognitive and affective functions. Interoceptive awareness has been primarily assessed via measuring the sensitivity for ones cardiac signals ("cardiac awareness") which can be non-invasively measured by heartbeat perception tasks. It is an open question whether cardiac awareness is related to the sensitivity for other bodily, visceral functions.

The body in the mind: on the relationship between interoception and embodiment.

The processing, representation, and perception of bodily signals (interoception) plays an important role for human behavior. Theories of embodied cognition hold that higher cognitive processes operate on perceptual symbols and that concept use involves reactivations of the sensory-motor states that occur during experience with the world. Similarly, activation of interoceptive representations and meta-representations of bodily signals supporting interoceptive awareness are profoundly associated with emotional experience and cognitive functions.

Effects of short-term food deprivation on interoceptive awareness, feelings and autonomic cardiac activity.

The perception of internal bodily signals (interoception) plays a relevant role for emotion processing and feelings. This study investigated changes of interoceptive awareness and cardiac autonomic activity induced by short-term food deprivation and its relationship to hunger and affective experience. 20 healthy women were exposed to 24h of food deprivation in a controlled setting.

Autonomic imbalance is associated with reduced facial recognition in somatoform disorders.

Objectives: Somatoform disorders are characterized by the presence of multiple somatic symptoms. While the accuracy of perceiving bodily signal (interoceptive awareness) is only sparely investigated in somatoform disorders, recent research has associated autonomic imbalance with cognitive and emotional difficulties in stress-related diseases. This study aimed to investigate how sympathovagal reactivity interacts with performance in recognizing emotions in faces (facial recognition task).

Emotional self-reference: brain structures involved in the processing of words describing one's own emotions.

The present functional magnetic resonance imaging study investigated the role of emotion-related (e.g., amygdala) and self-related brain structures (MPFC in particular) in the processing of emotional words varying in stimulus reference.

Blunted autonomic reactivity and increased pain tolerance in somatoform patients.

Somatoform disorders are characterized by the presence of multiple somatic symptoms. Patients often experience different pain syndromes, and recent research suggests that sympathovagal balance is disturbed in somatoform patients, which could be related to alteration in pain sensitivity. This study analyzed how proposed sympathovagal imbalance interacts with objective pain assessment and the imagination of pain in somatoform disorders.

Differential effects of alexithymia subscales on autonomic reactivity and anxiety during social stress.

Objectives: Alexithymia is characterized by a difficulty in identifying and describing one's emotions. Recent research has associated differential effects of the alexithymia facets to hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis markers during stress. This study aimed to analyze how the facets of alexithymia interact with autonomic reactivity as well as self- and observer-rated anxiety during a social stress task.