Interoceptive ability predicts aversion to losses

Abstract

Emotions have been proposed to inform risky decision-making through the influence of affective physiological responses on subjective value. The ability to perceive internal body states, or “interoception” may influence this relationship. Here, we examined whether interoception predicts participants' degree of loss aversion, which has been previously linked to choice-related arousal responses. Participants performed both a heartbeat-detection task indexing interoception and a risky monetary decision-making task, from which loss aversion, risk attitudes and choice consistency were parametrically measured. Interoceptive ability correlated selectively with loss aversion and was unrelated to the other value parameters. This finding suggests that specific and separable component processes underlying valuation are shaped not only by our physiological responses, as shown in previous findings, but also by our interoceptive access to such signals.

Keywords:

• Emotion
• Decision-making
• Interoception
• Loss aversion

The authors thank Daanish Chawala for assistance with data collection.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health under Grant AG039283 to EAP.

The authors thank Daanish Chawala for assistance with data collection.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health under Grant AG039283 to EAP.

Supplementary material

Supplementary material (Figure S1 and Table S1) is available via the ‘Supplementary’ tab on the article's online page. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2014.925426).