Sapienza, Università di Roma and CLNS@Sapienza, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Rome, Italy.
IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia, Rome, Italy.
Psychol Res. 2022 Nov;86(8):2468-2477. doi: 10.1007/s00426-021-01477-7.
Humans are unique in their ability to think about themselves and carry a more or less clear notion of who they are in their mind. Here we review recent evidence suggesting that the birth, maintenance, and loss of the abstract concept of 'self' is deeply tied to interoception, the sense of internal physiological signals. Interoception influences multiple facets of the self-concept, cutting across its material, social, moral, and agentive components. Overall, we argue that interoception contributes to the stability of the self-concept over time, unifying its layers and constraining the degree to which it is susceptible to external influences. Hence, the core features of the self-concept are those that correlate more with inner bodily states. We discuss the implications that this may have for theories of embodied cognition as well as for the understanding of psychiatric disorders in which the concept of self appears fragmented or loose. Finally, we formulate some empirical predictions that could be tested in future studies to shed further light on this emerging field.
人类具有独特的思考自身的能力，并在头脑中或多或少清晰地形成对自我的概念。在这里，我们回顾了最近的证据，这些证据表明，“自我”这一抽象概念的产生、维持和丧失与内感受有关，即对内部生理信号的感知。内感受影响自我概念的多个方面，贯穿其物质、社会、道德和能动性成分。总的来说，我们认为内感受有助于自我概念随时间的稳定，统一其各个层面，并限制其对外界影响的敏感程度。因此，自我概念的核心特征是与内在身体状态更相关的特征。我们讨论了这可能对具身认知理论以及对自我概念似乎碎片化或松散的精神障碍的理解产生的影响。最后，我们提出了一些可以在未来研究中进行测试的实证预测，以进一步阐明这一新兴领域。
