Self-reported interoception, worries and protective behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic: a longitudinal study.

Background: Protective behaviors were essential for minimizing the spread of the virus during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. It is often assumed that awareness of bodily sensations (interoception) can improve decision-making and facilitate adaptive behavior.

Objective: This paper investigates cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships between different aspects of self-reported interoception, trait anxiety, COVID-related worry, and health protective behaviors.

Questionnaires of interoception do not assess the same construct.

There are a number of questionnaires assessing the self-reported trait-like aspect of interoception, also called interoceptive sensibility (ISb). Based on the varying purposes of their development and characteristics, however, it is not likely that they assess exactly the same construct. In a community sample of 265 adults, we examined this assumption for three commonly used questionnaires of ISb, namely the Body Awareness subscale of the Body Perception Questionnaire (BPQ-BA), the Body Awareness Questionnaire (BAQ), and the eight subscales of Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA).

Mental heartbeat tracking and rating of emotional pictures are not related.

Our aim was to conceptually replicate the findings of previous empirical studies showing that people with higher cardiac interoceptive accuracy experience more intense emotions. Apart of the mental heartbeat tracking task of Schandry, Hungarian (n = 46, 76.0% female, mean age 22.

Sustained attention is related to heartbeat counting task performance but not to self-reported aspects of interoception and mindfulness.

Although association between sustained attention and various aspects of interoception (i.e. the perception of the body state) seems plausible, research on this subject is scarce.

Examining the Factor Structure and Validity of the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness.

The goal of this study was to psychometrically evaluate the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA), a popular self-report questionnaire claimed to assess the most important subjective aspects of interoception. We collected data in two samples (N = 644 and N = 1,516) and focused on the factor structure and validity of MAIA, as well as its associations with personality traits. Confirmatory Factor Analysis suggested that six of the eight subscales measure a common general factor of self-reported ; two MAIA subscales, and were only weakly related to this factor.