Interoception
The sense of the body's internal state (heartbeat, breathing, hunger, tension, temperature) and how accurately and consciously a person perceives it.
What drives it
The raw material of emotion; people who read their bodies well tend to recognise feelings earlier, which explains much of the variation in self-awareness.
How it shows
Work
Good interoception: 'I'm getting tense, let me pause.' Poor: suddenly snaps without warning, or works through hunger and exhaustion until they collapse; surprised by their own stress level.
Relationships
A partner who notices they are getting irritable because they are hungry versus one who blames the other; one who knows they are tired and says so versus one who starts a fight.
Self
Can you feel your heartbeat, the tension in your shoulders, hunger rising? Do you notice emotions in the body before you notice them in your thoughts?
What tells it apart
Alexithymia: Interoception is sensing the body's signals; alexithymia is difficulty turning those signals into named emotions. Someone can feel their heart pounding and still not know they are afraid.
Health anxiety: Accurate interoception notices signals and reads them in proportion; health anxiety over-attends to bodily sensations and interprets them as disease.
Affect labelling: Interoception is the sensing; affect labelling is naming the emotion, which reduces its intensity.
A test
Ask the person where in the body they feel stress and when they first notice it; vague answers and late detection suggest low interoceptive awareness.
Questions to carry
- Where in the body does the person feel stress, and how early do they notice it?
- Right now, what can I feel in my chest, my stomach and my hands?
How strong the research is
moderate. Interoception is an active research field linked to emotion and mental health, but the common heartbeat-counting measure has serious validity problems and self-report, accuracy and awareness often disagree.
Where it comes from
Charles Sherrington, 1906; A. D. (Bud) Craig, 2002; Sarah Garfinkel and colleagues, 2015
Sources
- Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)