Estimating Interoceptive Sensitivity

Congratulations Ella, a PhD candidate in IMAGE Otago, on your recently published first, first-author paper! Below is a summary of Ella's paper - if you would like to read the paper in full, please see the link at the bottom of the page. 

Impairments in interoception (the process of sensing, perceiving, and interpreting internal stimuli from the body) are considered characteristic of many mental health conditions, including anxiety. The problem is that standard science experiments have a hard time measuring interoceptive dimensions (like how sensitive someone is to change) accurately because everyone's baseline physiology (like their lung capacity or heart rate) is naturally different.

In this study Ella used data from a breathing-resistance task to see how sensitive people were to changes in their breathing. Instead of just looking at the raw, absolute numbers (like we've done before), she developed a new, physiology-adjusted metric. The aim of this new approach was to filter out the natural "noise" of an individual's unique lung and airway baseline to get a 'truer' reading of their actual breathing-related interoceptive sensitivity.

When comparing the new, adjusted metric to the method we have used before we found:

• The old approach was correlated with state anxiety (anxiety that is temporary or fleeting) and an individuals awareness of the connection between body state and emotions. 

• The new approach was correlated with maladaptive anxiety and depression symptoms.

By adjusting for our natural physiological differences, this new metric gives us a much cleaner idea of an individuals sensitivity. In the future we hope to use tasks or techniques similar to those explored here to help clinicians better identify, understand, and treat anxiety and depression.

If you would like to read Ella's paper, please visit: https://rsnz.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/snz2.70050