Body conscious?:Interoceptive awareness, measured by heartbeat perception, is negatively correlated with self-objectification

BACKGROUND: 'Self-objectification' is the tendency to experience one's body principally as an object, to be evaluated for its appearance rather than for its effectiveness. Within objectification theory, it has been proposed that self-objectification accounts for the poorer interoceptive awareness observed in women, as measured by heartbeat perception. Our study is, we believe, the first specifically to test this relationship. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Using a well-validated and reliable heartbeat perception task, we measured interoceptive awareness in women and compared this with their scores on the Self-Objectification Questionnaire, the Self-Consciousness Scale and the Body Consciousness Questionnaire. Interoceptive awareness was negatively correlated with self-objectification. Interoceptive awareness, public body consciousness and private body consciousness together explained 31% of the variance in self-objectification. However, private body consciousness was not significantly correlated with interoceptive awareness, which may explain the many nonsignificant results in self-objectification studies that have used private body consciousness as a measure of body awareness. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: We propose interoceptive awareness, assessed by heartbeat perception, as a measure of body awareness in self-objectification studies. Our findings have implications for those clinical conditions, in women, which are characterised by self-objectification and low interoceptive awareness, such as eating disorders

Heartfelt empathy? No association between interoceptive awareness, questionnaire measures of empathy, reading the mind in the eyes task or the director task

Interoception, defined as afferent information arising from within the body, is the basis of all emotional experience and underpins the ‘self’. However, people vary in the extent to which interoceptive signals reach awareness. This trait modulates both their experience of emotion and their ability to distinguish ‘self’ from ‘other’ in multisensory contexts. The experience of emotion and the degree of self/other distinction or overlap are similarly fundamental to empathy, which is an umbrella term comprising affect sharing, empathic concern and perspective-taking. A link has therefore often been assumed between interoceptive awareness and empathy despite a lack of clear evidence. To test the hypothesis that individual differences in both traits should correlate, we measured interoceptive awareness in four experiments, using a well-validated heartbeat perception task, and compared this with scores on several tests that relate to various aspects of empathy. We firstly measured scores on the Index of Interpersonal Reactivity and secondly on the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy. Thirdly, because the ‘simulationist’ account assumes that affect sharing is involved in recognising emotion, we employed the ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task’ for the recognition of facial expressions. Contrary to expectation, we found no significant relationships between interoceptive awareness and any aspect of these measures. This striking lack of direct links has important consequences for hypotheses about the extent to which empathy is necessarily embodied. Finally, to assess cognitive perspective-taking ability, which specifically requires self/other distinction, we used the ‘Director Task’ but found no relationship. We conclude that the abilities that make up empathy are potentially related to interoceptive awareness in a variety of conflicting ways, such that a direct association between interoceptive awareness and various components of empathy has yet to be established

How do we relate to our heart? Neurobehavioral differences across three types of engagement with cardiac interoception

Standard measures of interoception are typically limited to the conscious perception of heartbeats. However, the fundamental purpose of interoceptive signaling, is to regulate the body. We present a novel biofeedback paradigm to explore the neurobehavioral consequences of three different types of engagement with cardiac interoception (Attend, Feel, Regulate) while participants perform a 'cardiac recognition' task. For both the Feel and Regulate conditions, participants displayed enhanced recognition of their own heartbeat, accompanied by larger heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEPs), suggesting that these approaches could be used interchangeably. Importantly, meta-cognitive interoceptive insight was highest in the Regulate condition, indicative of stronger engagement with interoceptive signals in addition to greater ecological validity. Only in the passive interoception condition (Feel) was a significant association found between accuracy in recognising one's own heartbeat and the amplitude of HEPs. Overall, our results imply that active conditions have an important role to play in future investigation of interoception.</p

Sense of agency during and following recovery from anorexia nervosa

The need to feel in control is central to anorexia nervosa (AN). The sense of control in AN has only been studied through self-report. This study investigated whether implicit sense of control (sense of agency; SoA) differs across AN patients, recovered AN (RAN) patients and healthy controls (HC). Furthermore, we assessed whether state anxiety is influenced by negative emotional states. SoA was measured with the intentional binding task (IB) and state-anxiety levels through a questionnaire. We did not find any evidence of differences in SoA between groups. Furthermore, state anxiety was not a significant predictor of SoA. Further research into SoA in AN should focus on other features of the SoA that are not targeted by the IB task

Cardio-visual integration modulates the subjective perception of affectively neutral stimuli

Interoception, which refers to the perception of internal body signals, has been consistently associated with emotional processing and with the sense of self. However, its influence on the subjective appraisal of affectively neutral and body-unrelated stimuli is still largely unknown. Across two experiments we sought to investigate this issue by asking participants to detect changes in the flashing rhythm of a simple stimulus (a circle) that could either be pulsing synchronously with their own heartbeats or following the pattern of another person's heart. While overall task performance did not vary as a function of cardio-visual synchrony, participants were better at identifying trials in which no change occurred when the flashes were synchronous with their own heartbeats. This study adds to the growing body of research indicating that we use our body as a reference point when perceiving the world; and extends this view by focusing on the role that signals coming from inside the body, such as heartbeats, may play in this referencing process. Specifically we show that private interoceptive sensations can be combined with affectively neutral information unrelated to the self to influence the processing of a multisensory percept. Results are discussed in terms of both standard multisensory integration processes and predictive coding theories

Fine Tuning Your Heart: a novel method for measuring interoceptive accuracy

Interoception research is hampered by the lack of an agreed gold standard test of interoceptive accuracy. To avoid several confounds of heartbeat perception tasks, we devised a novel method of ‘heartbeat matching’, whereby participants use a custom-made slider to adjust the rate at which a heart icon is pulsing on a PC screen, to match this to the pace of their own heart. Because heartbeat counting has been shown to modulate with posture, participants completed both heartbeat matching and a standard heartbeat counting task while standing and when lying down. Accuracy was significantly higher in the heartbeat matching task. Moreover, ability to estimate elapsed time was also more accurate using the matching task but was not significantly correlated with interoceptive accuracy. Participants were more accurate on both tasks when lying down. However, participants underestimated the pace of their hearts in both methods. We discuss possible interpretations and how these might be distinguished

Descriptive statistics for all measures.

<p>Note.</p>a<p>Previously published mean and SD, n = 253 <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0055568#pone.0055568-Fenigstein1" target="_blank">[15]</a>.</p>b<p>Previously published mean and SD, n = 353 <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0055568#pone.0055568-Miller1" target="_blank">[21]</a>.</p>c<p>Previously published mean and SD, n = 421 <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0055568#pone.0055568-Fredrickson2" target="_blank">[19]</a>.</p

Scatter plot of self-objectification scores against interoceptive awareness.

<p>Scatter plot of self-objectification scores against interoceptive awareness.</p