Internal body awareness does not predict mental health, study finds
The human brain continuously receives information from inside the body that helps detect physical needs and emotional states, such as a racing heartbeat, shortness of breath, hunger, thirst, pain and body temperature. Its ability to sense and interpret these internal signals is known as interoception.
A recent study published in Nature Mental Health suggests that the ability to sense internal bodily signals, known as interoception, does not predict mental health disorders. Leah Banellis, the first author of the paper, explains that interoception has been proposed as a "transdiagnostic marker" that could explain symptoms across various psychiatric conditions.
However, previous studies have yielded inconsistent results, often due to unreliable measures of interoception. The researchers at Aarhus University and other institutes recruited a large group of participants and used various tasks to assess participants' interoceptive abilities, focusing on cardiac and respiratory interoception.
They also collected extensive information about participants' mental health symptoms. The findings indicate that interoceptive abilities were not related to mental health symptoms, challenging the notion that poor bodily sensing is a predictor of psychiatric symptoms. Instead, self-reported beliefs about bodily awareness, measured through questionnaires, were found to be largely unrelated to actual performance on interoception tasks.
The researchers suggest that earlier studies using questionnaires might have measured broader affective beliefs rather than genuine internal bodily perceptions. They propose that future studies should develop more reliable experimental tools to measure interoception and consider studying interoception as organ-specific processes tied to distinct symptom profiles.
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