Does it help to feel your body? Evidence is inconclusive that interoceptive accuracy and sensibility help cope with negative experiences

ABSTRACT

In four studies (total N = 534), we examined the moderating impact of Interoceptive Accuracy (i.e. IAcc, as measured with the heartbeat counting task) and Interoceptive Sensibility (IS, assessed via questionnaire) on negative affect, following social exclusion or after receiving negative feedback. Results from an integrative data analysis combining the four studies confirmed that the manipulations were successful at inducing negative affect. However, no significant interaction between mood induction (control versus negative affect induction) and interoception on mood measures was observed, and this was true both for objective (i.e. IAcc) and subjective (i.e. IS) measures of interoception. Hence, previous conclusions on the moderating impact of interoception in the relationship between mood induction and self-reported mood were neither replicated nor generalised to this larger sample. We discuss these findings in light of theories of emotion regulation as well as recent concerns raised about the validity of the heartbeat counting task.

KEYWORDS:

• Social exclusion
• negative affect
• mood
• interoceptive Accuracy
• heartbeat counting task
• interoceptive sensibility

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by an Excellence research grant funded by the Walloon region (Belgium), (FOOD4GUT: Innovative nutrition research on obesity based on colic nutriments. Biological, behavioural and societal aspects, project # 1318148). We would like to thank Anaïse Ferraz-Gomes (Experiment 1), Camille Lovenweent (Experiment 2), Manon Legros (Experiment 3), Olivier Desmedt, and Marie Samygin (Experiment 4) for their help in the data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Giorgia Zamariola http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6215-4756

Notes

1 Three of these studies were published but measured IAcc in relation to alexithymia (Zamariola, Vlemincx, et al., 2018), and the fourth study also served another research purpose (Zamariola, Luminet, Desmedt, & Corneille, 2019).

2 Another formula has been proposed by Garfinkel et al. (2015), namely: 1–(|actual heartbeats – reported heartbeats|)/((actual heartbeats + reported heartbeats)/2). However, in order to replicate previous findings, we used the formula adopted by Werner et al. (2013) and Pollatos et al. (2015). Of note, the two formulas were highly correlated in the present set of data (i.e. 98%).

3 These studies included also a visual memory task or eye-tracking task with food pictures (these tasks were included between the experimental manipulation and the questionnaires), but these variables are not discussed in the present research article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Walloon region (Belgium) [grant number 1318148].