Intuitive eating mediates the relationship between interoceptive accuracy and eating disorder risk.

Research supports an association between altered interoceptive accuracy, or the ability to accurately monitor sensations from the body, and disordered eating. However, the behavioral mechanism through which interoceptive accuracy may influence eating behaviors is unclear. Intuitive eating, the ability to regulate food intake according to visceral cues of hunger and satiety, is positively related to interoceptive accuracy and negatively related to disordered eating.

Overshadowing between visual and tactile stimulus elements in an object recognition task.

In recent decades there has been great progress in discovering the conditions under which cue competition occurs during animal learning. In humans, however, the evidence remains equivocal regarding the degree to which stimuli compete with one another for behavioral control. We report here the results of a single experiment wherein thirty-nine college students completed a novel cue competition task with visual and tactile stimuli.

Effects of heartbeat feedback on beliefs about heart rate and heartbeat counting: a cautionary tale about interoceptive awareness.

Heartbeat counting improves after exposure to heartbeat feedback either because feedback trains individuals to detect heartbeats or updates their knowledge/beliefs about heart rate. These possibilities were examined by assessing heartbeat counting, in different postures and following exercise, before and after exposure to immediate and delayed heartbeat feedback. Immediate and delayed feedback provided accurate information about heart rate and, therefore, either could update beliefs about heart rate.

Somatosensory amplification and its relationship to heartbeat detection ability.

Objective: Somatosensory amplification has been defined as the tendency to experience normal bodily sensations as intense, noxious, and disturbing. The present experiment investigated whether this tendency is due to heightened physiological sensitivity to bodily sensations.

Methods: The relationship between Somatosensory Amplification Scale (SSAS) scores and objective measures of the ability to detect bodily (ie, heartbeat) sensations derived from the Method of Constant Stimuli procedure was assessed.