Interoception Tutorial Flashcards
what pathway do interoceptive afferents follow?
spinothalamic (neuroanatomical)
what is interoception?
awareness and perception of internal bodily signals
- informs about physiological state of body
what does interoception aim to maintain and via how?
homeostasis via somato-autonomic reflexes and motivational behaviour
what was the initial view of interoception?
restrictive and purely visceral
* sherrington (1948) – information concerning functional state of the internal organs
what is the new approach to interoception?
inclusive (beginning to include other aspects of bodily functions like pain): general homeostatic sensory capacity
* Craig (2002, 2003, 2008) – information concerning the broader physiological state and motivational needs of the body
what are the 4 modalities of interoception? (what different physiological process might we use to perceive interoception?)
- Gastrointestinal
- Nociceptive (feeling of pain signals/burns/itch/sensory touch based)
- Thermoregulatory (awareness/recognition of body temperature changes)
- Cardiovascular (awareness of our breathing system and heartrate)
what are the 3 facets of interoception?
- interoceptive sensibility
- interoceptive accuracy
- interoceptive awareness
what is interoceptive sensibility?
- How interoceptive signals are detected, noticed and interpreted by the individual (as you experience it)
- Irrespective of how accurate they are (Garfinkel et al., 2015)
what is interoceptive accuracy (sensitivity)?
accuracy of identifying interoceptive signals compared with an objective measurement
what is interoceptive awareness?
- awareness of how good you are at recognising interoceptive sensations
- relationship between how good we think we are and how good we actually are
- combination of sensibility with accuracy
how is interoceptive sensibility measured?
Self report, e.g. Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA; Mehling et al., 2012)
how is interoceptive accuracy measured?
Behavioural tests, e.g. heart beat monitoring (HB counting/HB detection)
Neural measures, e.g. EEG/feeling your heart rate
MAIA task (Interoceptive Sensibility) - a 32 item questionnaire:
What is strengths?
large sample, quick efficient, increased validity of results, increased generalisability, application in different populations)
MAIA task (Interoceptive Sensibility) - a 32 item questionnaire:
What is limitations?
overly subjective, people may guess because they have to put themselves in a situation where they’ve felt a specific emotion
what are some theoretical issues of interoceptive accuracy tasks?
- does cardiac interoception represent all interoceptive domains?
- could someone, for example with an eating disorder, have poorer gastrointestinal interoception than other interoceptive processes?
- perceiving heartbeats through different perceptive channels (i.e. wearing different clothes may make it more difficult to feel)
- impairments of interoception
- disorders and BMI
what are some practical issues of interoceptive accuracy tasks like feeling your heartbeat?
- guessing - people tend to guess at roughly one per second
- silently counting in heartbeats and reporting at the end of the time elicits different estimations to reporting (tapping) each time a heartbeat is perceived
- Informing participants that it is OK to feel nothing can reduce guesses
- decision to confidently consider whether something is a heartbeat
- individual differences i.e. Gender
interoceptive accuracy practical issues and their link to gender?
- females reported heightened attention to interoceptive signals compared to males
- females are less accurate at detecting these signals than males
- driven by physical and hormonal differences between sexes
why is interoception important?
- awareness of physical symptoms is important for physical health maintaining homeostasis and associated with different medical conditions
what is homeostasis?
physical equilibrium
why is it important to understand differences in interoception?
to provide potential routes routes for support/treatment
- helping us to understand health disorders
what happens to the heart when we intensely feel fear? (Garfinkel et al., 2014)
contracts
what are emotions shaped by?
bodily state
why it important to understand emotions and how they are shaped by bodily state?
important for developing understanding of anxiety disorders
- associated with increased perception of cardiovascular activity
what does interoception play a key role in? (Jacquemot & Park, 2020)
Anorexia Nervosa (and other Eds)
- development and treatment
what is the link between interoception and schizophrenia? (Yao & Thakkar, 2021)
interoception and exteroception can play a role in positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia
who gives a comprehensive summary of ‘quite a few’ meanings of interoception?
Kahlsa et al. (2018)
