Feelings are conscious mental events that represent body states as they undergo homeostatic regulation. Feelings depend on the interoceptive nervous system (INS), a collection of peripheral and central pathways, nuclei and cortical regions which continuously sense chemical and anatomical changes in the organism. How such humoral and neural signals come to generate conscious mental states has been a major scientific question. The answer proposed here invokes (1) several distinctive and poorly known physiological features of the INS; and (2) a unique (...) interaction between the body (the ‘object’ of interoception) and the central nervous system (which generates the 'subject' of interoception). The atypical traits of the INS and the direct interactions between neural and non‐neural physiological compartments of the organism, neither of which is present in exteroceptive systems, plausibly explain the qualitative and subjective aspects of feelings, thus accounting for their conscious nature. (shrink)

Attention to internal body sensations is practiced in most meditation traditions. Many traditions state that this practice results in increased awareness of internal body sensations, but scientific studies evaluating this claim are lacking. We predicted that experienced meditators would display performance superior to that of nonmeditators on heartbeat detection, a standard noninvasive measure of resting interoceptive awareness. We compared two groups of meditators (Tibetan Buddhist and Kundalini) to an age- and body mass index-matched group of nonmeditators. Contrary to our prediction, (...) we found no evidence that meditators were superior to nonmeditators in the heartbeat detection task, across several sessions and respiratory modulation conditions. Compared to nonmeditators, however, meditators consistently rated their interoceptive performance as superior and the difficulty of the task as easier. These results provide evidence against the notion that practicing attention to internal body sensations, a core feature of meditation, enhances the ability to sense the heartbeat at rest. (shrink)

Attention to internal body sensations is practiced in most meditation traditions. Many traditions state that this practice results in increased awareness of internal body sensations, but scientific studies evaluating this claim are lacking. We predicted that experienced meditators would display performance superior to that of nonmeditators on heartbeat detection, a standard noninvasive measure of resting interoceptive awareness. We compared two groups of meditators (Tibetan Buddhist and Kundalini) to an age- and body mass index-matched group of nonmeditators. Contrary to our prediction, (...) we found no evidence that meditators were superior to nonmeditators in the heartbeat detection task, across several sessions and respiratory modulation conditions. Compared to nonmeditators, however, meditators consistently rated their interoceptive performance as superior and the difficulty of the task as easier. These results provide evidence against the notion that practicing attention to internal body sensations, a core feature of meditation, enhances the ability to sense the heartbeat at rest. (shrink)

Time processing is a multifaceted skill crucial for managing different aspects of life. In the current work, we explored the relationship between interoception and time processing by examining research on clinical models. We investigated whether time processing deficits are associated with dysfunction of the interoceptive system and/or insular cortex activity, which is crucial in decoding internal body signaling. Furthermore, we explored whether insular activation predicts the subjective experience of time (that is, the subjective duration of a target stimulus to (...) be timed). Overall, our work suggests that alteration of the interoceptive system could be a common psychophysiological hallmark of mental disorders affected by time processing deficits. (shrink)

Adopting the perspective of another person is an important aspect of social cognition and has been shown to depend on multisensory signals from one’s own body. Recent work suggests that interoceptive signals not only contribute to own-body perception and self-consciousness, but also to empathy. Here we investigated if social cognition – in particular adopting the perspective of another person – can be altered by a systematic manipulation of interoceptive cues and further, if this effect depends on empathic ability. The own-body (...) transformation task – wherein participants are instructed to imagine taking the perspective and position of a virtual body presented on a computer screen – offers an effective way to measure reaction time differences linked to the mental effort of taking an other’s perspective. Here, we adapted the OBT with the flashing of a silhouette surrounding the virtual body, either synchronously or asynchronously with the timing of participants’ heartbeats. We evaluated the impact of this cardio-visual synchrony on reaction times and accuracy rates in the OBT. Empathy was assessed with the empathy quotient questionnaire. Based on previous work using the cardio-visual paradigm, we predicted that synchronous cardio-visual stimulation would increase self-identification with the virtual body and facilitate participants’ ability to adopt the virtual body’s perspective, thereby enhancing performance on the task, particularly in participants with higher empathy scores. We report that participants with high empathy showed significantly better performance during the OBT task during synchronous versus asynchronous cardio-visual stimulation. Moreover, we found a significant positive correlation between empathic ability and the synchrony effect. We conclude that synchronous cardio-visual stimulation between the participant’s body and a virtual body during an OBT task makes it easier to adopt the virtual body’s perspective, presumably based on multisensory integration processes. However, this effect depended on empathic ability, suggesting that empathy, interoception and social perspective taking are inherently linked. (shrink)

The mainstream science of consciousness offers a few predominate views of how the brain gives rise to awareness. Chief among these are the Higher-Order Thought Theory, Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, Integrated Information Theory, and hybrids thereof. In parallel, rapid development in predictive processing approaches have begun to outline concrete mechanisms by which interoceptive inference shapes selfhood, affect, and exteroceptive perception. Here, we consider these new approaches in terms of what they might offer our empirical, phenomenological, and philosophical understanding of consciousness (...) and its neurobiological roots. (shrink)

Previous studies have revealed the effect of interoceptive accuracy, a behavioral measure of the ability to feel physiological states and regulation for that, which origin emotion on decision-making such as gambling. Given that decision-making in moral dilemma situations is affected by emotion, it seems that IAcc also affects moral decision-making. The present study preliminarily investigates whether IAcc affects decision-making and emotional ratings such as regret for one’s own choices in moral dilemma situations. IAcc did not affect moral choice, but affected (...) regret ratings for one’s moral choice in portions of dilemma scenarios. Moreover, people with higher IAcc make deontological choices more rapidly than those with lower IAcc in self-related dilemma scenarios. These results suggest that people with higher IAcc feel stronger emotional conflicts about utilitarian choices but weaker conflicts about deontological choices than people with lower IAcc depending on the moral dilemma scenario. (shrink)

The perception of being located within one’s body is an essential feature of everyday self-experience. However, by manipulating exteroceptive input, healthy participants can easily be induced to perceive themselves as being spatially dislocated from their physical bodies. It has previously been suggested that interoception, i.e., the processing of inner physiological signals, contributes to the stability of body representations; however, this relationship has not previously been tested for different dimensions of interoception and bodily self-location. In the present study, using (...) an advanced automatized setup, we systematically manipulated participants’ perspective of their own body as well as the synchrony of visuotactile stimulation. The malleability of bodily self-location was assessed using a questionnaire targeting in-body and out-of-body experiences. Participants also performed a heartbeat discrimination task to assess their interoceptive accuracy, interoceptive sensibility, and interoceptive awareness. Bodily self-location was significantly influenced by perspective, with third-person perspective being associated with stronger out-of-body experiences compared to first-person perspective. Furthermore, there was a significant perspective × stimulation interaction, with subsequent analyses showing that participants reported out-of-body experiences particularly under third-person perspective combined with synchronous visuotactile stimulation. Correlation and regression analyses revealed that meta-cognitive interoceptive awareness was specifically and negatively related to the exteroceptively mediated malleability of body experiences. These results indicate that the perception of the self being located within one’s body relies on the interaction of exteroceptive input and higher-order interoceptive abilities. This has implications for theoretical considerations about the bodily self in health as well as for the understanding of disturbed bodily self-processing in clinical contexts. (shrink)

The paper presents a new philosophical theory of blurred vision according to which visual experiences have two types of content: exteroceptive content, characterizing external entities, and interoceptive content, characterizing the state of the visual system. In particular, it is claimed that blurriness-related phenomenology interoceptively presents acuity of vision in relation to eye focus. The proposed theory is consistent with the representationalist thesis that phenomenal character supervenes on representational content and with the strong transparency thesis formulated in terms of mind-independentness. Furthermore, (...) the interoceptive approach is free from controversial assumptions adopted by other philosophical theories of blurred experiences and is able to account for the epistemic and motivational role of visual blur, i.e. that blurred experiences provide a prima facie justification for beliefs regarding our vision and motivate actions directed toward our eyes. (shrink)

Research has shown repeatedly that attention influences implicit learning effects. In a similar vein, interoceptive awareness might be involved in unaware fear conditioning: The fact that the CS is repeatedly presented in the context of aversive bodily experiences might facilitate the development of conditioned responding. We investigated the role of interoceptive attention in a subliminal conditioning paradigm. Conditioning was embedded in a spatial cueing task with subliminally presented cues that were followed by a masking stimulus. Response times to the targets (...) that were either validly or invalidly predicted by the cues served as index of conditioning. Interoceptive attention was manipulated between-subjects. Half the participants completed a heartbeat detection task before conditioning. This task tunes attention to one’s own bodily signals. We found that conditioned responding was facilitated in this latter group of participants. These results are in line with the hypothesis that a rise interoceptive attention enhances unaware conditioned responding. (shrink)

Addiction remains a challenging disorder, both to treat and to conceptualise. While the temporal dimension of addiction has been noted before, here the aim is to ground this understanding in a coherent phenomenological-neuroscience framework. Addiction is partly understood as drawing the subject into a predominantly “now” orientated existence, with the future closed or experienced as extremely distant. Another feature of this temporal structuring is that past experiences, which are crucial in advancing intentionally forward, are experienced in addiction as a void. (...) This has implications for the generation of meaning and forming of self, amongst others. While there are areas of the brain that regulate temporal processing, there is no single location. Recent addiction research has implicated the insula and in turn this area is implicated in temporal and interoceptive awareness. Similarly these areas of disruption may affect self processes. Disruption of interoception and thus of self, may help explain why addiction is complex and involves multiple aspects of subjectivity. (shrink)

Psychology distinguishes between a bodily and a narrative self. Within neuroscience, models of the bodily self are based on exteroceptive sensorimotor processes or on the integration of interoceptive sensations. Recent research has revealed interactions between interoceptive and exteroceptive processing of self-related information, for example that mirror self-observation can improve interoceptive awareness. Using heartbeat perception, we measured the effect on interoceptive awareness of two experimental manipulations, designed to heighten attention to bodily and narrative aspects of the self. Participants gazed at a (...) photograph of their own face or at self-relevant words. In both experimental conditions interoceptive awareness was significantly increased, compared to baseline. Results show that attention to narrative aspects of self, previously regarded as relying on higher-order processes, has an effect similar to self-face stimuli in improving interoceptive awareness. Our findings extend the previously observed interaction between the bodily self and interoception to more abstract amodal representations of the self. (shrink)

The feeling of being alive still constitutes a major blind spot of contemporary affective sciences research. The mainstream view accepts it as an ‘umbrella notion’ comprising different states, such as M. Ratcliffe’s «feelings of being», T. Fuchs’s «feeling of being alive», E.M. Engelen’s «Gefühl des Lebendigseins», etc. In contrast, I argue for an account of the feeling of being alive as a unique feeling that can be described in several ways. Empirical support for this view comes mainly from Carvalho and (...) Damasio’s hypothesis of the distinctiveness of the interoceptive system as the physiological underpinning of this feeling. This account is also in line with many other approaches recognizing the role of interoception proper in mind and subjectivity grounding, collected by Tsakiris and De Presteer. Over recent decades, Damasio’s organic descriptions have been widely acknowledged as neurophysiological counterparts of philosophical/psychological concepts. However, in my view they have been often misinterpreted, especially due to the mainstream Ratcliffian interpretation mediating his ideas amongst philosophers. Throughout the paper, a critical inquiry into Damasio’s conceptualization is provided, by means of conceptual analysis and an overall taxonomy of the several affective states he has proposed over the past few decades. Ultimately, a critical discussion of his own account of the feeling of being alive is offered from a philosophical viewpoint. (shrink)

The body-oriented approach in the philosophy of cognitive sciences is gaining in importance in the conditions of the formation of new high-tech contexts. The problem of interoception and integration of bodily data into socio-economic processes requires a comprehensive analysis and ethical assessment. This article examines the conceptual foundations of the body-oriented approach and its impact on the essence of cognitive processes. The main advantages and disadvantages of this approach are presented. We consider the methodological conflict zones of the bodily (...) paradigm and traditional methodological attitudes of the cognitive sciences. The system ofinteroceptive sensations is a special «layer» of bodily experience. The social functions of interoceptive sensations are an interdisciplinary research area that focuses on the mechanisms of interaction between the private content of bodily experience and systems of social interaction. The regularity between interoceptive sensations and human behavioral patterns reflects the importance of examining bodily data. Today, the market for bodily data is just beginning to form, but at the same time it is already playing an important role in global digital transformation processes. A multitude of applications and wearable digital devices that track bodily activity and generate gigantic amounts of data are used today by millions of people around the world. The identification of bodily activity leads to the emergence of new forms of interaction between a person and socio-institutional systems, the specific properties of which are also considered in this article. (shrink)

Addiction remains a challenging disorder, both to treat and to conceptualise. While the temporal dimension of addiction has been noted before, here the aim is to ground this understanding in a coherent phenomenological-neuroscience framework. Addiction is partly understood as drawing the subject into a predominantly “now” orientated existence, with the future closed or experienced as extremely distant. Another feature of this temporal structuring is that past experiences, which are crucial in advancing intentionally forward, are experienced in addiction as a void. (...) This has implications for the generation of meaning and forming of self, amongst others. While there are areas of the brain that regulate temporal processing, there is no single location. Recent addiction research has implicated the insula and in turn this area is implicated in temporal and interoceptive awareness. Similarly these areas of disruption may affect self processes. Disruption of interoception and thus of self, may help explain why addiction is complex and involves multiple aspects of subjectivity. (shrink)

Action understanding of children develops from simple associative learning to mentalizing. With the rise of embodied cognition, the role of interoception in action observation and action understanding has received more attention. From a developmental perspective, this study proposes a novel developmental model that explores how interoception promotes action understanding of children across ages. In early infancy, most actions observed in infants come from interactions with their caregivers. Babies learn about action effects through automatic interoceptive processing and interoceptive feedback. (...) Interoception in early infancy is not fully developed, such as the not fully developed gastrointestinal tract and intestinal nervous system. Therefore, in early infancy, action understanding is based on low-level and original interoceptive information. At this stage, after observing the actions of others, infants can create mental representations or even imitate actions without external visual feedback, which requires interoception to provide internal reference information. By early childhood, children begin to infer action intentions of other people by integrating various types of information to reach the mentalizing level. Interoception processing requires the integration of multiple internal signals, which promotes the information integration ability of children. Interoception also provides inner information for reasoning about action intention. This review also discussed the neural mechanisms of interoception and possible ways by which it could promote action understanding of children. In early infancy, the central autonomic neural network automatically processes and responds to the actions of caregivers on infants, providing interoceptive information for action understanding of infants. In infancy, the growth of the somatomotor system provides important internal reference information for observing and imitating the actions of infants. In early childhood, the development of interoception of children facilitates the integration of internal and external information, which promotes the mentalization of action understanding of children. According to the proposed developmental model of action understanding of children promoted by interoception, there are multilevel and stage-dependent characteristics that impact the role of interoception in action understanding of children. (shrink)

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. This article gives an overview over present findings and models on (...) class='Hi'>interoception and mechanisms of embodiment and highlights its relevance for disorders that are suggested to represent a translation deficit of bodily states into subjective feelings and self-awareness. (shrink)

Background: Alexithymia is a personality trait which is characterized by an inability to identify and describe conscious emotions of oneself and others.Aim: The present study aimed to determine whether various measures of mental health, interoception, psychological flexibility, and self-as-context, predicted through linear associations alexithymia as an outcome. This also included relevant mediators and non-linear predictors identified for particular sub-groups of participants through cluster analyses of an Artificial Neural Network output.Methodology: Two hundred and thirty participants completed an online survey which (...) included the following questionnaires: Toronto alexithymia scale; Acceptance and Action Questionnaire 2 ; Positive and Negative Affect Scale, Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale 21 ; Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness ; and the Self-as-Context scale. A stepwise backwards linear regression and mediation analysis were performed, as well as a cluster analysis of the non-linear ANN upper hidden layer output.Results: Higher levels of alexithymia were associated with increased psychological inflexibility, lower positive affect scores, and lower interoception for the subscales of “not distracting” and “attention regulation.” SAC mediated the relation between emotional regulation and total alexithymia. The ANNs accounted for more of the variance than the linear regressions, and were able to identify complex and varied patterns within the participant subgroupings.Conclusion: The findings were discussed within the context of developing a SAC processed-based therapeutic model for alexithymia, where it is suggested that alexithymia is a complex and multi-faceted condition, which requires a similarly complex, and process-based approach to accurately diagnose and treat this condition. (shrink)