Garfinkel Sarah N, Manassei Miranda F, Hamilton-Fletcher Giles, In den Bosch Yvo, Critchley Hugo D, Engels Miriam
Psychiatry, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, Brighton, UK
Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, Brighton, UK.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2016 Nov 19;371(1708). doi: 10.1098/rstb.2016.0014. Epub 2016 Oct 10.
Interoception refers to the sensing of signals concerning the internal state of the body. Individual differences in interoceptive sensitivity are proposed to account for differences in affective processing, including the expression of anxiety. The majority of investigations of interoceptive accuracy focus on cardiac signals, typically using heartbeat detection tests and self-report measures. Consequently, little is known about how different organ-specific axes of interoception relate to each other or to symptoms of anxiety. Here, we compare interoception for cardiac and respiratory signals. We demonstrate a dissociation between cardiac and respiratory measures of interoceptive accuracy (i.e. task performance), yet a positive relationship between cardiac and respiratory measures of interoceptive awareness (i.e. metacognitive insight into own interoceptive ability). Neither interoceptive accuracy nor metacognitive awareness for cardiac and respiratory measures was related to touch acuity, an exteroceptive sense. Specific measures of interoception were found to be predictive of anxiety symptoms. Poor respiratory accuracy was associated with heightened anxiety score, while good metacognitive awareness for cardiac interoception was associated with reduced anxiety. These findings highlight that detection accuracies across different sensory modalities are dissociable and future work can better delineate their relationship to affective and cognitive constructs.This article is part of the themed issue 'Interoception beyond homeostasis: affect, cognition and mental health'.
内感受是指对有关身体内部状态的信号的感知。内感受敏感性的个体差异被认为可以解释情感加工方面的差异，包括焦虑的表现。大多数关于内感受准确性的研究都集中在心脏信号上，通常使用心跳检测测试和自我报告测量方法。因此，对于不同器官特异性的内感受轴之间如何相互关联或与焦虑症状有何关联，我们知之甚少。在这里，我们比较了对心脏和呼吸信号的内感受。我们证明了内感受准确性（即任务表现）的心脏和呼吸测量之间存在分离，但内感受意识（即对自身内感受能力的元认知洞察）的心脏和呼吸测量之间存在正相关。心脏和呼吸测量的内感受准确性和元认知意识均与触觉敏锐度（一种外感受）无关。发现特定的内感受测量可预测焦虑症状。呼吸准确性差与焦虑评分升高有关，而对心脏内感受的良好元认知意识与焦虑减轻有关。这些发现突出表明，不同感觉模态的检测准确性是可分离的，未来的研究可以更好地描绘它们与情感和认知结构的关系。本文是主题为“超越内稳态的内感受：情感、认知和心理健康”的特刊的一部分。
