#interoception — Public Fediverse posts

If physical sensations and emotions have seemed non-relevant to you, the way they did to me for most of my life, here's an idea worth considering. 1/3

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #AuDHD #Sensory #Interoception

If physical sensations and emotions have seemed non-relevant to you, the way they did to me for most of my life, here's an idea worth considering. 1/3

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #AuDHD #Sensory #Interoception

If physical sensations and emotions have seemed non-relevant to you, the way they did to me for most of my life, here's an idea worth considering. 1/3

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #AuDHD #Sensory #Interoception

If physical sensations and emotions have seemed non-relevant to you, the way they did to me for most of my life, here's an idea worth considering. 1/3

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #AuDHD #Sensory #Interoception

If physical sensations and emotions have seemed non-relevant to you, the way they did to me for most of my life, here's an idea worth considering. 1/3

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #AuDHD #Sensory #Interoception

#Today #3Things

1. I managed to isolate a residential proxy botnet that was hammering one of my client servers, and after adding some new htaccess rules, I've got CPU and RAM use down from 95% to about 25% and no more 503 errors. #Tech #WordPress #VPS #Hosting #DDoS

2. Monitoring my posture more carefully while at my desk working (and playing). My #interoception is a bit unreliable like many #neurodivergent folk, but a mindful body scan approach may help, if I can stay aware of it. My trouble is that I get so absorbed in what I'm doing, nothing else exists.

3. View from one of my study windows this morning. More controlled and supervised burning in the southmost hectare, in preparation for cultivation. #Farming #FarmLife

#Today #3Things

1. I managed to isolate a residential proxy botnet that was hammering one of my client servers, and after adding some new htaccess rules, I've got CPU and RAM use down from 95% to about 25% and no more 503 errors. #Tech #WordPress #VPS #Hosting #DDoS

2. Monitoring my posture more carefully while at my desk working (and playing). My #interoception is a bit unreliable like many #neurodivergent folk, but a mindful body scan approach may help, if I can stay aware of it. My trouble is that I get so absorbed in what I'm doing, nothing else exists.

3. View from one of my study windows this morning. More controlled and supervised burning in the southmost hectare, in preparation for cultivation. #Farming #FarmLife

#Today #3Things

1. I managed to isolate a residential proxy botnet that was hammering one of my client servers, and after adding some new htaccess rules, I've got CPU and RAM use down from 95% to about 25% and no more 503 errors. #Tech #WordPress #VPS #Hosting #DDoS

2. Monitoring my posture more carefully while at my desk working (and playing). My #interoception is a bit unreliable like many #neurodivergent folk, but a mindful body scan approach may help, if I can stay aware of it. My trouble is that I get so absorbed in what I'm doing, nothing else exists.

3. View from one of my study windows this morning. More controlled and supervised burning in the southmost hectare, in preparation for cultivation. #Farming #FarmLife

#Today #3Things

1. I managed to isolate a residential proxy botnet that was hammering one of my client servers, and after adding some new htaccess rules, I've got CPU and RAM use down from 95% to about 25% and no more 503 errors. #Tech #WordPress #VPS #Hosting #DDoS

2. Monitoring my posture more carefully while at my desk working (and playing). My #interoception is a bit unreliable like many #neurodivergent folk, but a mindful body scan approach may help, if I can stay aware of it. My trouble is that I get so absorbed in what I'm doing, nothing else exists.

3. View from one of my study windows this morning. More controlled and supervised burning in the southmost hectare, in preparation for cultivation. #Farming #FarmLife

#Today #3Things

1. I managed to isolate a residential proxy botnet that was hammering one of my client servers, and after adding some new htaccess rules, I've got CPU and RAM use down from 95% to about 25% and no more 503 errors. #Tech #WordPress #VPS #Hosting #DDoS

2. Monitoring my posture more carefully while at my desk working (and playing). My #interoception is a bit unreliable like many #neurodivergent folk, but a mindful body scan approach may help, if I can stay aware of it. My trouble is that I get so absorbed in what I'm doing, nothing else exists.

3. View from one of my study windows this morning. More controlled and supervised burning in the southmost hectare, in preparation for cultivation. #Farming #FarmLife

Maybe there's a reason you're not doing that thing.

Maybe there's a sensory issue. Maybe it's overwhelming your nervous system. Maybe you physically or cognitively don't know how to do it.

So your brain defaults to just not doing it. 1/2

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #Sensory #Interoception #Neurodiversity

Maybe there's a reason you're not doing that thing.

Maybe there's a sensory issue. Maybe it's overwhelming your nervous system. Maybe you physically or cognitively don't know how to do it.

So your brain defaults to just not doing it. 1/2

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #Sensory #Interoception #Neurodiversity

Maybe there's a reason you're not doing that thing.

Maybe there's a sensory issue. Maybe it's overwhelming your nervous system. Maybe you physically or cognitively don't know how to do it.

So your brain defaults to just not doing it. 1/2

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #Sensory #Interoception #Neurodiversity

Maybe there's a reason you're not doing that thing.

Maybe there's a sensory issue. Maybe it's overwhelming your nervous system. Maybe you physically or cognitively don't know how to do it.

So your brain defaults to just not doing it. 1/2

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #Sensory #Interoception #Neurodiversity

Maybe there's a reason you're not doing that thing.

Maybe there's a sensory issue. Maybe it's overwhelming your nervous system. Maybe you physically or cognitively don't know how to do it.

So your brain defaults to just not doing it. 1/2

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #Sensory #Interoception #Neurodiversity

DATE: August 4, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------

TITLE: People who feel lonely show altered brain activity when processing internal physical signals

URL: https://www.psypost.org/people-who-feel-lonely-show-altered-brain-activity-when-processing-internal-physical-signals/

A recent study published in Biological Psychology suggests that loneliness is linked to how people perceive and process their internal bodily sensations. The findings indicate that individuals who report higher levels of loneliness tend to have less trust in their bodily signals and show reduced brain activity related to monitoring their heartbeats. This research offers a physiological perspective on why loneliness is often accompanied by heightened emotional distress.

Loneliness is commonly understood as a lack of social contact, but psychologists describe it as a state of heightened sensitivity to negative emotions and social threats. This perspective is known as the hypervigilance model of loneliness. According to this framework, lonely individuals tend to be on high alert for social rejection, which can lead to increased stress and difficulty managing emotional reactions.

“Loneliness is a significant global issue linked to various mental and physical health problems,” said study author Kentaro Ono, an assistant professor at the Center for Brain, Mind, and KANSEI Sciences Research at Hiroshima University. “In Japan, it is taken so seriously that the government has even appointed a Minister of Loneliness.”

Ono noted that his laboratory has a background in psychiatry, which led to an interest in how loneliness acts as a trigger for psychiatric disorders. “While there is a great deal of research on who is prone to loneliness and how to cope with it, the underlying mechanisms of how loneliness actually arises remain largely unknown,” Ono said.

The research team noticed that emotional isolation is frequently described in physical terms. “We noticed that people often describe loneliness through physical sensations, such as a tightening in the chest or a sinking feeling,” Ono said. “Our lab was already investigating ‘interoception’, which is the perception of our internal bodily states. Therefore, we were motivated to bridge this gap by exploring the relationship between loneliness and interoception, hoping to better understand how these emotional struggles physically manifest in the body.”

Emotion regulation depends heavily on this process of interoception. Psychologists divide interoception into different categories to better understand how it works. Interoceptive accuracy refers to how well a person can physically detect internal signals, such as a racing heart. Interoceptive sensibility describes a person’s subjective beliefs about their bodily sensations, including whether they view these physical responses as trustworthy or distressing.

Previous research hints that interoceptive sensibility plays a role in how well people manage negative feelings. Brain regions involved in cognitive control, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, are also known to help process bodily signals. This area of the brain helps integrate physical sensations with emotional meaning to regulate distress.

To measure this brain-body connection, scientists often look at the heartbeat-evoked potential. This is a specific pattern of electrical brain activity that occurs in response to each individual heartbeat. Researchers designed the current study to explore whether loneliness is associated with differences in interoceptive accuracy, interoceptive sensibility, and heartbeat-evoked brain activity.

The scientists recruited 45 healthy university students between the ages of 18 and 25. Six participants were later excluded due to issues with data quality, leaving a final sample of 39 participants. Participants first completed a series of questionnaires. These included the UCLA Loneliness Scale to measure subjective feelings of isolation, the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) to gauge interoceptive sensibility, and a standard inventory to assess depressive symptoms.

Next, the participants completed two behavioral tasks to measure their interoceptive accuracy. In a heartbeat counting task, they were asked to silently count their heartbeats over various time intervals ranging from 25 to 50 seconds without checking their pulse. In a heartbeat discrimination task, they listened to a series of tones and had to judge whether the sounds were in sync with their own physical heartbeats or delayed.

Finally, the researchers recorded the participants’ brain and heart activity. Participants sat in a quiet, dimly lit room for three minutes while the researchers collected continuous electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings. EEG uses sensors on the scalp to measure electrical brain waves, and ECG measures the electrical activity of the heart. The researchers used these concurrent recordings to extract the heartbeat-evoked potential, allowing them to see how the brain responded to cardiac events.

The average loneliness score in the sample was 40.5 out of a possible 80 points, indicating a moderate level of loneliness among the students. The survey findings indicated that higher loneliness scores correlated with specific aspects of interoceptive sensibility. People who felt more lonely tended to report more worry about their bodily sensations. They also reported lower emotional awareness, less ability to use bodily sensations to regulate distress, and less trust in their bodies as a safe resource.

“We were quite surprised, and ultimately reassured, by the specific patterns in our survey data,” Ono told PsyPost. He noted that the MAIA questionnaire measures interoceptive sensibility across several different categories. “We found a strong correlation between the UCLA Loneliness Scale and one specific category of MAIA: the one reflecting how people think about or appraise their bodily states. Seeing the correlation clearly localized to this specific category, rather than being broadly scattered across all categories, gave us a lot of confidence in the reliability of our data.”

Loneliness was not associated with interoceptive accuracy. Participants with higher loneliness scores were just as capable of accurately counting their heartbeats and distinguishing synchronized tones as those with lower scores. Heart rate variability, a physiological measure of the changes in time intervals between consecutive heartbeats, also showed no statistical relationship with loneliness.

When looking at the EEG recordings, the researchers found an association between loneliness and the brain’s processing of cardiac signals. Higher loneliness scores were associated with a reduced electrical brain response to heartbeats over the left frontal areas of the scalp. Using specialized source localization software, the scientists traced this reduced electrical activity to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is a brain region typically involved in higher-order cognitive control and emotion regulation.

To ensure these brain activity patterns were linked to loneliness rather than other factors, the researchers ran additional statistical models. The association between loneliness and reduced brain responses to heartbeats remained present even after the researchers controlled for the participants’ age, sex, and severity of depressive symptoms. This provides evidence that the observed physiological differences relate specifically to the experience of loneliness rather than general depression.

“The most important takeaway is that the brain and the body are in constant communication, and changes in your bodily state impact your mental state,” Ono said. “Therefore, paying attention and taking care of your physical body is crucial for your emotional well-being.”

Ono added that these findings support the idea that social connection helps people regulate their physical responses. “In our study, we interpret that individuals with low levels of loneliness have brains that successfully detect bodily changes triggered by isolating situations, allowing them to effectively regulate and correct their bodily states,” Ono explained. “Conversely, individuals with high levels of loneliness tend to ignore or not worry about these altered physical states.”

“Because they fail to attend to and adjust their physical response to isolation, they may fall deeper into loneliness,” Ono noted. “Based on this, we suggest that practices which help you deliberately direct attention to your body, such as yoga or mindfulness meditation, could be effective methods for alleviating loneliness.”

The study relies on a cross-sectional design, meaning the researchers measured all variables at a single point in time. Because of this design, it is impossible to determine the direction of the relationship. Reduced brain processing of bodily signals might contribute to feelings of loneliness, or chronic social disconnection might lead to changes in how the brain handles internal sensations.

“One important caveat is that our current study had a relatively small sample size of about 40 participants,” Ono said. “Because of this, we must be careful not to overstate the strength of these effects just yet.”

This small sample of university students generally reported moderate loneliness, meaning the findings might not apply to older adults or individuals experiencing severe, chronic social isolation. The study also recorded brain activity during a resting state rather than during an active emotional task. This limits the ability to tie the brain activity patterns directly to active emotion regulation in real-time social situations.

The use of EEG to track the source of brain activity has spatial limitations compared to other imaging techniques. Although the data points to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, EEG sensors on the scalp provide only an approximation of where electrical signals originate in the brain. “To draw firmer, more generalized conclusions, we are already planning a much larger-scale study to further investigate this relationship between loneliness and interoception,” Ono added.

“Moving forward, we are very interested in whether we can predict an individual’s future vulnerability to loneliness,” Ono said. “For example, entering university is a major environmental shift where many students face isolating situations.”

“If we can use these findings to screen for individuals who are highly susceptible to loneliness during such transitions, we might be able to design and implement much more effective, preventative interventions.”

The study, “Loneliness is associated with altered interoceptive appraisal and attenuated prefrontal heartbeat-evoked potentials,” was authored by Kentaro Ono, Takafumi Sasaoka, and Shigeto Yamawaki.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/people-who-feel-lonely-show-altered-brain-activity-when-processing-internal-physical-signals/

-------------------------------------------------

Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org

Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot

-------------------------------------------------

#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #Loneliness #Interoception #HeartbeatEvokedPotentials #BrainBodyConnection #DLPFC #EmotionalRegulation #SocialIsolation #Mindfulness #YogaForLoneliness #MentalHealthResearch

DATE: August 4, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------

TITLE: People who feel lonely show altered brain activity when processing internal physical signals

URL: https://www.psypost.org/people-who-feel-lonely-show-altered-brain-activity-when-processing-internal-physical-signals/

A recent study published in Biological Psychology suggests that loneliness is linked to how people perceive and process their internal bodily sensations. The findings indicate that individuals who report higher levels of loneliness tend to have less trust in their bodily signals and show reduced brain activity related to monitoring their heartbeats. This research offers a physiological perspective on why loneliness is often accompanied by heightened emotional distress.

Loneliness is commonly understood as a lack of social contact, but psychologists describe it as a state of heightened sensitivity to negative emotions and social threats. This perspective is known as the hypervigilance model of loneliness. According to this framework, lonely individuals tend to be on high alert for social rejection, which can lead to increased stress and difficulty managing emotional reactions.

“Loneliness is a significant global issue linked to various mental and physical health problems,” said study author Kentaro Ono, an assistant professor at the Center for Brain, Mind, and KANSEI Sciences Research at Hiroshima University. “In Japan, it is taken so seriously that the government has even appointed a Minister of Loneliness.”

Ono noted that his laboratory has a background in psychiatry, which led to an interest in how loneliness acts as a trigger for psychiatric disorders. “While there is a great deal of research on who is prone to loneliness and how to cope with it, the underlying mechanisms of how loneliness actually arises remain largely unknown,” Ono said.

The research team noticed that emotional isolation is frequently described in physical terms. “We noticed that people often describe loneliness through physical sensations, such as a tightening in the chest or a sinking feeling,” Ono said. “Our lab was already investigating ‘interoception’, which is the perception of our internal bodily states. Therefore, we were motivated to bridge this gap by exploring the relationship between loneliness and interoception, hoping to better understand how these emotional struggles physically manifest in the body.”

Emotion regulation depends heavily on this process of interoception. Psychologists divide interoception into different categories to better understand how it works. Interoceptive accuracy refers to how well a person can physically detect internal signals, such as a racing heart. Interoceptive sensibility describes a person’s subjective beliefs about their bodily sensations, including whether they view these physical responses as trustworthy or distressing.

Previous research hints that interoceptive sensibility plays a role in how well people manage negative feelings. Brain regions involved in cognitive control, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, are also known to help process bodily signals. This area of the brain helps integrate physical sensations with emotional meaning to regulate distress.

To measure this brain-body connection, scientists often look at the heartbeat-evoked potential. This is a specific pattern of electrical brain activity that occurs in response to each individual heartbeat. Researchers designed the current study to explore whether loneliness is associated with differences in interoceptive accuracy, interoceptive sensibility, and heartbeat-evoked brain activity.

The scientists recruited 45 healthy university students between the ages of 18 and 25. Six participants were later excluded due to issues with data quality, leaving a final sample of 39 participants. Participants first completed a series of questionnaires. These included the UCLA Loneliness Scale to measure subjective feelings of isolation, the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) to gauge interoceptive sensibility, and a standard inventory to assess depressive symptoms.

Next, the participants completed two behavioral tasks to measure their interoceptive accuracy. In a heartbeat counting task, they were asked to silently count their heartbeats over various time intervals ranging from 25 to 50 seconds without checking their pulse. In a heartbeat discrimination task, they listened to a series of tones and had to judge whether the sounds were in sync with their own physical heartbeats or delayed.

Finally, the researchers recorded the participants’ brain and heart activity. Participants sat in a quiet, dimly lit room for three minutes while the researchers collected continuous electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings. EEG uses sensors on the scalp to measure electrical brain waves, and ECG measures the electrical activity of the heart. The researchers used these concurrent recordings to extract the heartbeat-evoked potential, allowing them to see how the brain responded to cardiac events.

The average loneliness score in the sample was 40.5 out of a possible 80 points, indicating a moderate level of loneliness among the students. The survey findings indicated that higher loneliness scores correlated with specific aspects of interoceptive sensibility. People who felt more lonely tended to report more worry about their bodily sensations. They also reported lower emotional awareness, less ability to use bodily sensations to regulate distress, and less trust in their bodies as a safe resource.

“We were quite surprised, and ultimately reassured, by the specific patterns in our survey data,” Ono told PsyPost. He noted that the MAIA questionnaire measures interoceptive sensibility across several different categories. “We found a strong correlation between the UCLA Loneliness Scale and one specific category of MAIA: the one reflecting how people think about or appraise their bodily states. Seeing the correlation clearly localized to this specific category, rather than being broadly scattered across all categories, gave us a lot of confidence in the reliability of our data.”

Loneliness was not associated with interoceptive accuracy. Participants with higher loneliness scores were just as capable of accurately counting their heartbeats and distinguishing synchronized tones as those with lower scores. Heart rate variability, a physiological measure of the changes in time intervals between consecutive heartbeats, also showed no statistical relationship with loneliness.

When looking at the EEG recordings, the researchers found an association between loneliness and the brain’s processing of cardiac signals. Higher loneliness scores were associated with a reduced electrical brain response to heartbeats over the left frontal areas of the scalp. Using specialized source localization software, the scientists traced this reduced electrical activity to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is a brain region typically involved in higher-order cognitive control and emotion regulation.

To ensure these brain activity patterns were linked to loneliness rather than other factors, the researchers ran additional statistical models. The association between loneliness and reduced brain responses to heartbeats remained present even after the researchers controlled for the participants’ age, sex, and severity of depressive symptoms. This provides evidence that the observed physiological differences relate specifically to the experience of loneliness rather than general depression.

“The most important takeaway is that the brain and the body are in constant communication, and changes in your bodily state impact your mental state,” Ono said. “Therefore, paying attention and taking care of your physical body is crucial for your emotional well-being.”

Ono added that these findings support the idea that social connection helps people regulate their physical responses. “In our study, we interpret that individuals with low levels of loneliness have brains that successfully detect bodily changes triggered by isolating situations, allowing them to effectively regulate and correct their bodily states,” Ono explained. “Conversely, individuals with high levels of loneliness tend to ignore or not worry about these altered physical states.”

“Because they fail to attend to and adjust their physical response to isolation, they may fall deeper into loneliness,” Ono noted. “Based on this, we suggest that practices which help you deliberately direct attention to your body, such as yoga or mindfulness meditation, could be effective methods for alleviating loneliness.”

The study relies on a cross-sectional design, meaning the researchers measured all variables at a single point in time. Because of this design, it is impossible to determine the direction of the relationship. Reduced brain processing of bodily signals might contribute to feelings of loneliness, or chronic social disconnection might lead to changes in how the brain handles internal sensations.

“One important caveat is that our current study had a relatively small sample size of about 40 participants,” Ono said. “Because of this, we must be careful not to overstate the strength of these effects just yet.”

This small sample of university students generally reported moderate loneliness, meaning the findings might not apply to older adults or individuals experiencing severe, chronic social isolation. The study also recorded brain activity during a resting state rather than during an active emotional task. This limits the ability to tie the brain activity patterns directly to active emotion regulation in real-time social situations.

The use of EEG to track the source of brain activity has spatial limitations compared to other imaging techniques. Although the data points to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, EEG sensors on the scalp provide only an approximation of where electrical signals originate in the brain. “To draw firmer, more generalized conclusions, we are already planning a much larger-scale study to further investigate this relationship between loneliness and interoception,” Ono added.

“Moving forward, we are very interested in whether we can predict an individual’s future vulnerability to loneliness,” Ono said. “For example, entering university is a major environmental shift where many students face isolating situations.”

“If we can use these findings to screen for individuals who are highly susceptible to loneliness during such transitions, we might be able to design and implement much more effective, preventative interventions.”

The study, “Loneliness is associated with altered interoceptive appraisal and attenuated prefrontal heartbeat-evoked potentials,” was authored by Kentaro Ono, Takafumi Sasaoka, and Shigeto Yamawaki.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/people-who-feel-lonely-show-altered-brain-activity-when-processing-internal-physical-signals/

-------------------------------------------------

Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org

Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot

-------------------------------------------------

#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #Loneliness #Interoception #HeartbeatEvokedPotentials #BrainBodyConnection #DLPFC #EmotionalRegulation #SocialIsolation #Mindfulness #YogaForLoneliness #MentalHealthResearch

DATE: August 4, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------

TITLE: People who feel lonely show altered brain activity when processing internal physical signals

URL: https://www.psypost.org/people-who-feel-lonely-show-altered-brain-activity-when-processing-internal-physical-signals/

A recent study published in Biological Psychology suggests that loneliness is linked to how people perceive and process their internal bodily sensations. The findings indicate that individuals who report higher levels of loneliness tend to have less trust in their bodily signals and show reduced brain activity related to monitoring their heartbeats. This research offers a physiological perspective on why loneliness is often accompanied by heightened emotional distress.

Loneliness is commonly understood as a lack of social contact, but psychologists describe it as a state of heightened sensitivity to negative emotions and social threats. This perspective is known as the hypervigilance model of loneliness. According to this framework, lonely individuals tend to be on high alert for social rejection, which can lead to increased stress and difficulty managing emotional reactions.

“Loneliness is a significant global issue linked to various mental and physical health problems,” said study author Kentaro Ono, an assistant professor at the Center for Brain, Mind, and KANSEI Sciences Research at Hiroshima University. “In Japan, it is taken so seriously that the government has even appointed a Minister of Loneliness.”

Ono noted that his laboratory has a background in psychiatry, which led to an interest in how loneliness acts as a trigger for psychiatric disorders. “While there is a great deal of research on who is prone to loneliness and how to cope with it, the underlying mechanisms of how loneliness actually arises remain largely unknown,” Ono said.

The research team noticed that emotional isolation is frequently described in physical terms. “We noticed that people often describe loneliness through physical sensations, such as a tightening in the chest or a sinking feeling,” Ono said. “Our lab was already investigating ‘interoception’, which is the perception of our internal bodily states. Therefore, we were motivated to bridge this gap by exploring the relationship between loneliness and interoception, hoping to better understand how these emotional struggles physically manifest in the body.”

Emotion regulation depends heavily on this process of interoception. Psychologists divide interoception into different categories to better understand how it works. Interoceptive accuracy refers to how well a person can physically detect internal signals, such as a racing heart. Interoceptive sensibility describes a person’s subjective beliefs about their bodily sensations, including whether they view these physical responses as trustworthy or distressing.

Previous research hints that interoceptive sensibility plays a role in how well people manage negative feelings. Brain regions involved in cognitive control, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, are also known to help process bodily signals. This area of the brain helps integrate physical sensations with emotional meaning to regulate distress.

To measure this brain-body connection, scientists often look at the heartbeat-evoked potential. This is a specific pattern of electrical brain activity that occurs in response to each individual heartbeat. Researchers designed the current study to explore whether loneliness is associated with differences in interoceptive accuracy, interoceptive sensibility, and heartbeat-evoked brain activity.

The scientists recruited 45 healthy university students between the ages of 18 and 25. Six participants were later excluded due to issues with data quality, leaving a final sample of 39 participants. Participants first completed a series of questionnaires. These included the UCLA Loneliness Scale to measure subjective feelings of isolation, the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) to gauge interoceptive sensibility, and a standard inventory to assess depressive symptoms.

Next, the participants completed two behavioral tasks to measure their interoceptive accuracy. In a heartbeat counting task, they were asked to silently count their heartbeats over various time intervals ranging from 25 to 50 seconds without checking their pulse. In a heartbeat discrimination task, they listened to a series of tones and had to judge whether the sounds were in sync with their own physical heartbeats or delayed.

Finally, the researchers recorded the participants’ brain and heart activity. Participants sat in a quiet, dimly lit room for three minutes while the researchers collected continuous electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings. EEG uses sensors on the scalp to measure electrical brain waves, and ECG measures the electrical activity of the heart. The researchers used these concurrent recordings to extract the heartbeat-evoked potential, allowing them to see how the brain responded to cardiac events.

The average loneliness score in the sample was 40.5 out of a possible 80 points, indicating a moderate level of loneliness among the students. The survey findings indicated that higher loneliness scores correlated with specific aspects of interoceptive sensibility. People who felt more lonely tended to report more worry about their bodily sensations. They also reported lower emotional awareness, less ability to use bodily sensations to regulate distress, and less trust in their bodies as a safe resource.

“We were quite surprised, and ultimately reassured, by the specific patterns in our survey data,” Ono told PsyPost. He noted that the MAIA questionnaire measures interoceptive sensibility across several different categories. “We found a strong correlation between the UCLA Loneliness Scale and one specific category of MAIA: the one reflecting how people think about or appraise their bodily states. Seeing the correlation clearly localized to this specific category, rather than being broadly scattered across all categories, gave us a lot of confidence in the reliability of our data.”

Loneliness was not associated with interoceptive accuracy. Participants with higher loneliness scores were just as capable of accurately counting their heartbeats and distinguishing synchronized tones as those with lower scores. Heart rate variability, a physiological measure of the changes in time intervals between consecutive heartbeats, also showed no statistical relationship with loneliness.

When looking at the EEG recordings, the researchers found an association between loneliness and the brain’s processing of cardiac signals. Higher loneliness scores were associated with a reduced electrical brain response to heartbeats over the left frontal areas of the scalp. Using specialized source localization software, the scientists traced this reduced electrical activity to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is a brain region typically involved in higher-order cognitive control and emotion regulation.

To ensure these brain activity patterns were linked to loneliness rather than other factors, the researchers ran additional statistical models. The association between loneliness and reduced brain responses to heartbeats remained present even after the researchers controlled for the participants’ age, sex, and severity of depressive symptoms. This provides evidence that the observed physiological differences relate specifically to the experience of loneliness rather than general depression.

“The most important takeaway is that the brain and the body are in constant communication, and changes in your bodily state impact your mental state,” Ono said. “Therefore, paying attention and taking care of your physical body is crucial for your emotional well-being.”

Ono added that these findings support the idea that social connection helps people regulate their physical responses. “In our study, we interpret that individuals with low levels of loneliness have brains that successfully detect bodily changes triggered by isolating situations, allowing them to effectively regulate and correct their bodily states,” Ono explained. “Conversely, individuals with high levels of loneliness tend to ignore or not worry about these altered physical states.”

“Because they fail to attend to and adjust their physical response to isolation, they may fall deeper into loneliness,” Ono noted. “Based on this, we suggest that practices which help you deliberately direct attention to your body, such as yoga or mindfulness meditation, could be effective methods for alleviating loneliness.”

The study relies on a cross-sectional design, meaning the researchers measured all variables at a single point in time. Because of this design, it is impossible to determine the direction of the relationship. Reduced brain processing of bodily signals might contribute to feelings of loneliness, or chronic social disconnection might lead to changes in how the brain handles internal sensations.

“One important caveat is that our current study had a relatively small sample size of about 40 participants,” Ono said. “Because of this, we must be careful not to overstate the strength of these effects just yet.”

This small sample of university students generally reported moderate loneliness, meaning the findings might not apply to older adults or individuals experiencing severe, chronic social isolation. The study also recorded brain activity during a resting state rather than during an active emotional task. This limits the ability to tie the brain activity patterns directly to active emotion regulation in real-time social situations.

The use of EEG to track the source of brain activity has spatial limitations compared to other imaging techniques. Although the data points to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, EEG sensors on the scalp provide only an approximation of where electrical signals originate in the brain. “To draw firmer, more generalized conclusions, we are already planning a much larger-scale study to further investigate this relationship between loneliness and interoception,” Ono added.

“Moving forward, we are very interested in whether we can predict an individual’s future vulnerability to loneliness,” Ono said. “For example, entering university is a major environmental shift where many students face isolating situations.”

“If we can use these findings to screen for individuals who are highly susceptible to loneliness during such transitions, we might be able to design and implement much more effective, preventative interventions.”

The study, “Loneliness is associated with altered interoceptive appraisal and attenuated prefrontal heartbeat-evoked potentials,” was authored by Kentaro Ono, Takafumi Sasaoka, and Shigeto Yamawaki.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/people-who-feel-lonely-show-altered-brain-activity-when-processing-internal-physical-signals/

-------------------------------------------------

Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org

Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot

-------------------------------------------------

#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #Loneliness #Interoception #HeartbeatEvokedPotentials #BrainBodyConnection #DLPFC #EmotionalRegulation #SocialIsolation #Mindfulness #YogaForLoneliness #MentalHealthResearch

A common thing when you start exploring sensory stuff is that you find all this stuff that you’ve been shutting out, you’ve been working to dissociate from, to ignore, to numb, or to cancel out in various ways.

And it just feels like everything is just more annoying rather than helping. 1/3

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #AuDHD #Sensory #Interoception

A common thing when you start exploring sensory stuff is that you find all this stuff that you’ve been shutting out, you’ve been working to dissociate from, to ignore, to numb, or to cancel out in various ways.

And it just feels like everything is just more annoying rather than helping. 1/3

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #AuDHD #Sensory #Interoception

A common thing when you start exploring sensory stuff is that you find all this stuff that you’ve been shutting out, you’ve been working to dissociate from, to ignore, to numb, or to cancel out in various ways.

And it just feels like everything is just more annoying rather than helping. 1/3

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #AuDHD #Sensory #Interoception

A common thing when you start exploring sensory stuff is that you find all this stuff that you’ve been shutting out, you’ve been working to dissociate from, to ignore, to numb, or to cancel out in various ways.

And it just feels like everything is just more annoying rather than helping. 1/3

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #AuDHD #Sensory #Interoception

A common thing when you start exploring sensory stuff is that you find all this stuff that you’ve been shutting out, you’ve been working to dissociate from, to ignore, to numb, or to cancel out in various ways.

And it just feels like everything is just more annoying rather than helping. 1/3

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #AuDHD #Sensory #Interoception

DATE: July 29, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------

TITLE: What if psychopathic behavior stems from a surprisingly basic physical glitch?

URL: https://www.psypost.org/what-if-psychopathic-behavior-stems-from-a-surprisingly-basic-physical-glitch/

A recent review article suggests that psychopathy is related to dysfunction in the brain systems responsible for sensing and regulating the internal physical state of the body. The findings provide evidence that impaired bodily regulation may contribute to the hallmark emotional and behavioral traits of the disorder. This research was published in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior.

Philip Deming, a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University, and Clare Shaffer, a graduate student at Northeastern University who will soon transition to a postdoctoral role at Massachusetts General Hospital, wanted to approach the study of psychopathy from an evolutionary, body-centered perspective. The financial and emotional toll of the disorder motivated their research.

“We want to understand the brain mechanisms of psychopathy because the disorder has a terrible impact on society,” said Deming. “Psychopathic people often steal, cheat, exploit, and victimize other people, costing the US hundreds of billions of dollars each year and causing real suffering.”

Because current science lacks proper treatments for these behaviors, the researchers turned to the brain for answers. However, they noticed that past attempts to map psychopathy often started by looking at a specific behavioral symptom, like a lack of empathy, and then tried to find a matching brain signature.

“The trick is that we approached this question from a somewhat unusual starting point,” Deming explained. “In the past, scientists have started by looking at human behavior and studying how the brain enacts those behaviors. We see people experiencing emotions or empathizing with other people, so scientists would study how the brain ‘does’ emotion or empathy.”

Instead, Deming and Shaffer took a deductive route, starting with the brain’s fundamental evolutionary purpose.

“We started from the question: ‘What is a brain for?’” Deming said. “If you look at our evolutionary history, then the answer seems to be this: the brain is for regulating the internal organs of the body (the heart, lungs, gut, and so on).”

Evolutionary biology suggests that brains developed to anticipate and meet the metabolic needs of the body before those needs actually arise. This preventative, highly efficient regulatory process is known as allostasis. To coordinate the organs, the brain must constantly monitor the internal physical conditions of the organs, such as heart rate, digestion, and breathing. The brain’s ability to sense these internal physical states is called interoception.

“To coordinate the organs, the brain has to sense them. These processes are called allostasis and interoception, so we call this an ‘allostatic-interoceptive view’ of the brain,” Deming noted. “Once we take this view, new questions and new answers emerge about what might be happening in the brains of psychopathic people.”

These complementary functions rely on the allostatic-interoceptive system, which spans multiple brainstem regions, subcortical structures, and large-scale neural networks. Signals from the body travel up to the brain through two primary pathways. One pathway is the vagus nerve, which runs from the abdomen up the front of the neck. The other pathway is the spinal cord, which carries sensory information from various internal organs up into the brainstem.

Once these signals reach the brainstem, they are distributed to various subcortical and cortical regions. The brain continuously uses this incoming information to fine-tune ongoing cognitive processes and adjust bodily functions. This dynamic indicates that a person’s heartbeat or breathing pattern can directly influence how they perceive the world around them.

To explore this concept, the researchers synthesized existing evidence from a wide array of published neuroimaging studies on psychopathy. They examined data from structural imaging, which looks at the physical wiring of the brain, as well as functional imaging, which tracks blood flow and brain activity over time. The synthesis included meta-analyses, which are large mathematical reviews that combine data from dozens of previous brain scans.

“Psychopathy might be a disorder of sensing and regulating the body’s organ systems,” Deming said. “When we looked across 20-plus years’ worth of MRI studies, brain differences kept popping up within the ‘allostatic-interoceptive system.’ This is a widespread brain system that plays a central role in sensing and regulating the body.”

The authors reviewed studies involving community members as well as forensic populations, such as people in prisons. They specifically looked at fractional anisotropy, a metric used to measure the structural health of white matter tracts. White matter serves as the physical cabling that connects different brain regions, allowing them to communicate rapidly.

“In psychopathy, this system appears to have degraded white matter pathways,” Deming explained. “It also interacts with other brain networks differently. And it shows different patterns of activity when psychopathic people are focusing on a task like empathizing with another person.”

Specifically, the uncinate fasciculus and the cingulum show signs of degradation. These neural pathways link the emotional centers of the brain to the areas responsible for high-level decision-making and bodily regulation.

“The root problem might not be one of empathy or emotion but of something more fundamental,” Deming said. “The root problem might be in how the brain manages the heart, lungs, and other organs and prepares them to meet the demands of the current context.”

In addition to physical wiring differences, the scientists found evidence of altered functional connectivity. Functional connectivity refers to how well different areas of the brain activate together and share information during rest or active tasks. The data indicates that people with psychopathy show reduced communication between the cortex and deeper brain structures like the amygdala.

When the brain cannot properly share information between these areas, the resulting regulatory signals lack rich contextual details. The authors propose that this impairment leads to a highly context-insensitive way of regulating the body. During cognitively demanding tasks, people with psychopathy also display unusual patterns of brain activation.

Because of these altered patterns, people with psychopathy often show lower skin conductance and heart rate responses when anticipating a stressful event, such as a mild electric shock. They also tend to display abnormal hormonal regulation in response to social stressors. People with psychopathy frequently exhibit unusually high baseline levels of testosterone and oxytocin, alongside blunted cortisol responses during stressful situations.

The researchers suggest that these impoverished regulatory signals may hinder a person’s ability to allocate attention to important environmental cues. If the brain fails to properly integrate internal bodily signals with external sensory information, it struggles to identify what is actually important for survival. This failure might explain why people with psychopathy selectively focus on certain cues while entirely disregarding threats.

Taking this body-centered view also helps clarify decades of fragmented research. Historically, different scientists have proposed different core deficits for psychopathy, ranging from poor attention to a lack of fear.

“It was surprising to see how this theory might weave together previous theories about psychopathy,” Deming told PsyPost. “Scientists tend to think of these previous theories as being distant and disconnected from one another; they don’t predict or explain the same phenomena.”

Rather than seeing these older ideas as entirely separate, the researchers believe a focus on bodily regulation connects them.

“But I think most of those theories can be easily folded into our view, which says that the problem is in how the brain is sensing and regulating the body,” Deming continued. “This process is central to emotional experience, drives attention, and heavily involves the autonomic nervous system, all of which have been pointed to by prior theories as the central problem in psychopathy.”

It is important to recognize the potential misinterpretations and limitations of this theoretical framework. The model relies heavily on indirect spatial associations between past brain imaging results and known regulatory networks.

“The big caveat is that MRI findings in relation to psychopathy are all over the map,” Deming said. “Although we found some recurring findings in brain regions that are important for sensing and regulating the body, studies usually fail to replicate one another.”

Because of natural biological flexibility, a single behavioral trait might look completely different in the brain scans of two different individuals.

“One study will find lower activity in region A, while another study will find the opposite, higher activity in region A, along with lower activity in region B,” Deming explained. “Our field needs to grapple with these inconsistencies.”

To explain why previous brain imaging studies of psychopathy have been so inconsistent, Deming and Shaffer introduced two concepts.

“And while some scientists in the field point to methodological differences between studies, we proposed two new ideas in the field,” Deming said. “First, inconsistent findings could result from core dysfunction in the allostatic-interoceptive system.”

The regions managing bodily regulation sit at the very top of a neural processing hierarchy. A disruption at this high level can alter activity in many downstream sensory regions, creating the illusion of scattered, inconsistent brain abnormalities across different studies.

“This is a possibility, supported in part by a recent study from Dugré and De Brito, since this system can change activity throughout the brain depending on the current context of the body in the world,” Deming noted.

The scientists also introduced a concept called degeneracy, which is an organizing principle in biology meaning that different brain structures can achieve the exact same functional outcome.

“Second, and relatedly, brain function differs across contexts (this is called degeneracy),” he continued. “Basically, we probably shouldn’t expect findings to replicate when we’re averaging across people and across instances, and instead we should be studying individual brains regulating individual bodies in context.”

Moving forward, the scientists recommend shifting away from group-average studies and moving toward precision psychiatry. This approach involves deeply tracking individual patients across many different contexts to see how their specific brain and body interact.

“The next step is to more deeply probe how the brains of psychopathic people are sensing and regulating their bodies,” Deming said. “This is a process few studies have studied in a targeted way, and those studies mostly focused on how people perceive their heartbeat consciously.”

Researchers might test these regulatory mechanisms directly by safely manipulating a person’s internal physical signals. This could involve stimulating the vagus nerve or using ingestible vibrating capsules to alter sensations in the gut.

“But there are somewhat more hidden processes we should also be studying,” Deming explained. “For example, how do their brains integrate bodily signals with signals arriving to the eyes and ears? If we slightly alter what is happening in their heart and lungs, can we change how they process social information?”

Advancements in ultra-high field magnetic resonance imaging will likely aid these future studies by allowing scientists to see incredibly small structures in the brainstem.

“We can also start using more powerful MRI scanners to better image the small brain structures that make up the allostatic-interoceptive system,” Deming added.

Currently, there is a severe lack of evidence-based treatments that target the biological roots of psychopathy. However, interventions that directly address internal sensing, such as specific biofeedback therapies, have shown some early promise. In biofeedback training, patients observe real-time monitors of their own heart rate or brain waves and practice volitionally controlling them.

Some past biofeedback studies have successfully trained individuals with psychopathy to regulate specific brain regions connected to the allostatic network. These early interventions appeared to reduce aggressive and impulsive behaviors. By combining detailed imaging with targeted biofeedback therapies, clinicians might eventually develop personalized treatments that train patients to better monitor and regulate their internal states.

The study, “Brain evidence of allostatic and interoceptive dysfunction in psychopathy,” was authored by Philip Deming and Clare Shaffer.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/what-if-psychopathic-behavior-stems-from-a-surprisingly-basic-physical-glitch/

-------------------------------------------------

Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org

Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot

-------------------------------------------------

#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #psychopathy #allostaticinteroceptive #interoception #allostasis #brainregulation #neuroscience #biofeedback #MRI #forensicpsychology #emotiondysfunction

DATE: July 29, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------

TITLE: What if psychopathic behavior stems from a surprisingly basic physical glitch?

URL: https://www.psypost.org/what-if-psychopathic-behavior-stems-from-a-surprisingly-basic-physical-glitch/

A recent review article suggests that psychopathy is related to dysfunction in the brain systems responsible for sensing and regulating the internal physical state of the body. The findings provide evidence that impaired bodily regulation may contribute to the hallmark emotional and behavioral traits of the disorder. This research was published in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior.

Philip Deming, a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University, and Clare Shaffer, a graduate student at Northeastern University who will soon transition to a postdoctoral role at Massachusetts General Hospital, wanted to approach the study of psychopathy from an evolutionary, body-centered perspective. The financial and emotional toll of the disorder motivated their research.

“We want to understand the brain mechanisms of psychopathy because the disorder has a terrible impact on society,” said Deming. “Psychopathic people often steal, cheat, exploit, and victimize other people, costing the US hundreds of billions of dollars each year and causing real suffering.”

Because current science lacks proper treatments for these behaviors, the researchers turned to the brain for answers. However, they noticed that past attempts to map psychopathy often started by looking at a specific behavioral symptom, like a lack of empathy, and then tried to find a matching brain signature.

“The trick is that we approached this question from a somewhat unusual starting point,” Deming explained. “In the past, scientists have started by looking at human behavior and studying how the brain enacts those behaviors. We see people experiencing emotions or empathizing with other people, so scientists would study how the brain ‘does’ emotion or empathy.”

Instead, Deming and Shaffer took a deductive route, starting with the brain’s fundamental evolutionary purpose.

“We started from the question: ‘What is a brain for?’” Deming said. “If you look at our evolutionary history, then the answer seems to be this: the brain is for regulating the internal organs of the body (the heart, lungs, gut, and so on).”

Evolutionary biology suggests that brains developed to anticipate and meet the metabolic needs of the body before those needs actually arise. This preventative, highly efficient regulatory process is known as allostasis. To coordinate the organs, the brain must constantly monitor the internal physical conditions of the organs, such as heart rate, digestion, and breathing. The brain’s ability to sense these internal physical states is called interoception.

“To coordinate the organs, the brain has to sense them. These processes are called allostasis and interoception, so we call this an ‘allostatic-interoceptive view’ of the brain,” Deming noted. “Once we take this view, new questions and new answers emerge about what might be happening in the brains of psychopathic people.”

These complementary functions rely on the allostatic-interoceptive system, which spans multiple brainstem regions, subcortical structures, and large-scale neural networks. Signals from the body travel up to the brain through two primary pathways. One pathway is the vagus nerve, which runs from the abdomen up the front of the neck. The other pathway is the spinal cord, which carries sensory information from various internal organs up into the brainstem.

Once these signals reach the brainstem, they are distributed to various subcortical and cortical regions. The brain continuously uses this incoming information to fine-tune ongoing cognitive processes and adjust bodily functions. This dynamic indicates that a person’s heartbeat or breathing pattern can directly influence how they perceive the world around them.

To explore this concept, the researchers synthesized existing evidence from a wide array of published neuroimaging studies on psychopathy. They examined data from structural imaging, which looks at the physical wiring of the brain, as well as functional imaging, which tracks blood flow and brain activity over time. The synthesis included meta-analyses, which are large mathematical reviews that combine data from dozens of previous brain scans.

“Psychopathy might be a disorder of sensing and regulating the body’s organ systems,” Deming said. “When we looked across 20-plus years’ worth of MRI studies, brain differences kept popping up within the ‘allostatic-interoceptive system.’ This is a widespread brain system that plays a central role in sensing and regulating the body.”

The authors reviewed studies involving community members as well as forensic populations, such as people in prisons. They specifically looked at fractional anisotropy, a metric used to measure the structural health of white matter tracts. White matter serves as the physical cabling that connects different brain regions, allowing them to communicate rapidly.

“In psychopathy, this system appears to have degraded white matter pathways,” Deming explained. “It also interacts with other brain networks differently. And it shows different patterns of activity when psychopathic people are focusing on a task like empathizing with another person.”

Specifically, the uncinate fasciculus and the cingulum show signs of degradation. These neural pathways link the emotional centers of the brain to the areas responsible for high-level decision-making and bodily regulation.

“The root problem might not be one of empathy or emotion but of something more fundamental,” Deming said. “The root problem might be in how the brain manages the heart, lungs, and other organs and prepares them to meet the demands of the current context.”

In addition to physical wiring differences, the scientists found evidence of altered functional connectivity. Functional connectivity refers to how well different areas of the brain activate together and share information during rest or active tasks. The data indicates that people with psychopathy show reduced communication between the cortex and deeper brain structures like the amygdala.

When the brain cannot properly share information between these areas, the resulting regulatory signals lack rich contextual details. The authors propose that this impairment leads to a highly context-insensitive way of regulating the body. During cognitively demanding tasks, people with psychopathy also display unusual patterns of brain activation.

Because of these altered patterns, people with psychopathy often show lower skin conductance and heart rate responses when anticipating a stressful event, such as a mild electric shock. They also tend to display abnormal hormonal regulation in response to social stressors. People with psychopathy frequently exhibit unusually high baseline levels of testosterone and oxytocin, alongside blunted cortisol responses during stressful situations.

The researchers suggest that these impoverished regulatory signals may hinder a person’s ability to allocate attention to important environmental cues. If the brain fails to properly integrate internal bodily signals with external sensory information, it struggles to identify what is actually important for survival. This failure might explain why people with psychopathy selectively focus on certain cues while entirely disregarding threats.

Taking this body-centered view also helps clarify decades of fragmented research. Historically, different scientists have proposed different core deficits for psychopathy, ranging from poor attention to a lack of fear.

“It was surprising to see how this theory might weave together previous theories about psychopathy,” Deming told PsyPost. “Scientists tend to think of these previous theories as being distant and disconnected from one another; they don’t predict or explain the same phenomena.”

Rather than seeing these older ideas as entirely separate, the researchers believe a focus on bodily regulation connects them.

“But I think most of those theories can be easily folded into our view, which says that the problem is in how the brain is sensing and regulating the body,” Deming continued. “This process is central to emotional experience, drives attention, and heavily involves the autonomic nervous system, all of which have been pointed to by prior theories as the central problem in psychopathy.”

It is important to recognize the potential misinterpretations and limitations of this theoretical framework. The model relies heavily on indirect spatial associations between past brain imaging results and known regulatory networks.

“The big caveat is that MRI findings in relation to psychopathy are all over the map,” Deming said. “Although we found some recurring findings in brain regions that are important for sensing and regulating the body, studies usually fail to replicate one another.”

Because of natural biological flexibility, a single behavioral trait might look completely different in the brain scans of two different individuals.

“One study will find lower activity in region A, while another study will find the opposite, higher activity in region A, along with lower activity in region B,” Deming explained. “Our field needs to grapple with these inconsistencies.”

To explain why previous brain imaging studies of psychopathy have been so inconsistent, Deming and Shaffer introduced two concepts.

“And while some scientists in the field point to methodological differences between studies, we proposed two new ideas in the field,” Deming said. “First, inconsistent findings could result from core dysfunction in the allostatic-interoceptive system.”

The regions managing bodily regulation sit at the very top of a neural processing hierarchy. A disruption at this high level can alter activity in many downstream sensory regions, creating the illusion of scattered, inconsistent brain abnormalities across different studies.

“This is a possibility, supported in part by a recent study from Dugré and De Brito, since this system can change activity throughout the brain depending on the current context of the body in the world,” Deming noted.

The scientists also introduced a concept called degeneracy, which is an organizing principle in biology meaning that different brain structures can achieve the exact same functional outcome.

“Second, and relatedly, brain function differs across contexts (this is called degeneracy),” he continued. “Basically, we probably shouldn’t expect findings to replicate when we’re averaging across people and across instances, and instead we should be studying individual brains regulating individual bodies in context.”

Moving forward, the scientists recommend shifting away from group-average studies and moving toward precision psychiatry. This approach involves deeply tracking individual patients across many different contexts to see how their specific brain and body interact.

“The next step is to more deeply probe how the brains of psychopathic people are sensing and regulating their bodies,” Deming said. “This is a process few studies have studied in a targeted way, and those studies mostly focused on how people perceive their heartbeat consciously.”

Researchers might test these regulatory mechanisms directly by safely manipulating a person’s internal physical signals. This could involve stimulating the vagus nerve or using ingestible vibrating capsules to alter sensations in the gut.

“But there are somewhat more hidden processes we should also be studying,” Deming explained. “For example, how do their brains integrate bodily signals with signals arriving to the eyes and ears? If we slightly alter what is happening in their heart and lungs, can we change how they process social information?”

Advancements in ultra-high field magnetic resonance imaging will likely aid these future studies by allowing scientists to see incredibly small structures in the brainstem.

“We can also start using more powerful MRI scanners to better image the small brain structures that make up the allostatic-interoceptive system,” Deming added.

Currently, there is a severe lack of evidence-based treatments that target the biological roots of psychopathy. However, interventions that directly address internal sensing, such as specific biofeedback therapies, have shown some early promise. In biofeedback training, patients observe real-time monitors of their own heart rate or brain waves and practice volitionally controlling them.

Some past biofeedback studies have successfully trained individuals with psychopathy to regulate specific brain regions connected to the allostatic network. These early interventions appeared to reduce aggressive and impulsive behaviors. By combining detailed imaging with targeted biofeedback therapies, clinicians might eventually develop personalized treatments that train patients to better monitor and regulate their internal states.

The study, “Brain evidence of allostatic and interoceptive dysfunction in psychopathy,” was authored by Philip Deming and Clare Shaffer.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/what-if-psychopathic-behavior-stems-from-a-surprisingly-basic-physical-glitch/

-------------------------------------------------

Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org

Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot

-------------------------------------------------

#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #psychopathy #allostaticinteroceptive #interoception #allostasis #brainregulation #neuroscience #biofeedback #MRI #forensicpsychology #emotiondysfunction

DATE: July 29, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------

TITLE: What if psychopathic behavior stems from a surprisingly basic physical glitch?

URL: https://www.psypost.org/what-if-psychopathic-behavior-stems-from-a-surprisingly-basic-physical-glitch/

A recent review article suggests that psychopathy is related to dysfunction in the brain systems responsible for sensing and regulating the internal physical state of the body. The findings provide evidence that impaired bodily regulation may contribute to the hallmark emotional and behavioral traits of the disorder. This research was published in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior.

Philip Deming, a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University, and Clare Shaffer, a graduate student at Northeastern University who will soon transition to a postdoctoral role at Massachusetts General Hospital, wanted to approach the study of psychopathy from an evolutionary, body-centered perspective. The financial and emotional toll of the disorder motivated their research.

“We want to understand the brain mechanisms of psychopathy because the disorder has a terrible impact on society,” said Deming. “Psychopathic people often steal, cheat, exploit, and victimize other people, costing the US hundreds of billions of dollars each year and causing real suffering.”

Because current science lacks proper treatments for these behaviors, the researchers turned to the brain for answers. However, they noticed that past attempts to map psychopathy often started by looking at a specific behavioral symptom, like a lack of empathy, and then tried to find a matching brain signature.

“The trick is that we approached this question from a somewhat unusual starting point,” Deming explained. “In the past, scientists have started by looking at human behavior and studying how the brain enacts those behaviors. We see people experiencing emotions or empathizing with other people, so scientists would study how the brain ‘does’ emotion or empathy.”

Instead, Deming and Shaffer took a deductive route, starting with the brain’s fundamental evolutionary purpose.

“We started from the question: ‘What is a brain for?’” Deming said. “If you look at our evolutionary history, then the answer seems to be this: the brain is for regulating the internal organs of the body (the heart, lungs, gut, and so on).”

Evolutionary biology suggests that brains developed to anticipate and meet the metabolic needs of the body before those needs actually arise. This preventative, highly efficient regulatory process is known as allostasis. To coordinate the organs, the brain must constantly monitor the internal physical conditions of the organs, such as heart rate, digestion, and breathing. The brain’s ability to sense these internal physical states is called interoception.

“To coordinate the organs, the brain has to sense them. These processes are called allostasis and interoception, so we call this an ‘allostatic-interoceptive view’ of the brain,” Deming noted. “Once we take this view, new questions and new answers emerge about what might be happening in the brains of psychopathic people.”

These complementary functions rely on the allostatic-interoceptive system, which spans multiple brainstem regions, subcortical structures, and large-scale neural networks. Signals from the body travel up to the brain through two primary pathways. One pathway is the vagus nerve, which runs from the abdomen up the front of the neck. The other pathway is the spinal cord, which carries sensory information from various internal organs up into the brainstem.

Once these signals reach the brainstem, they are distributed to various subcortical and cortical regions. The brain continuously uses this incoming information to fine-tune ongoing cognitive processes and adjust bodily functions. This dynamic indicates that a person’s heartbeat or breathing pattern can directly influence how they perceive the world around them.

To explore this concept, the researchers synthesized existing evidence from a wide array of published neuroimaging studies on psychopathy. They examined data from structural imaging, which looks at the physical wiring of the brain, as well as functional imaging, which tracks blood flow and brain activity over time. The synthesis included meta-analyses, which are large mathematical reviews that combine data from dozens of previous brain scans.

“Psychopathy might be a disorder of sensing and regulating the body’s organ systems,” Deming said. “When we looked across 20-plus years’ worth of MRI studies, brain differences kept popping up within the ‘allostatic-interoceptive system.’ This is a widespread brain system that plays a central role in sensing and regulating the body.”

The authors reviewed studies involving community members as well as forensic populations, such as people in prisons. They specifically looked at fractional anisotropy, a metric used to measure the structural health of white matter tracts. White matter serves as the physical cabling that connects different brain regions, allowing them to communicate rapidly.

“In psychopathy, this system appears to have degraded white matter pathways,” Deming explained. “It also interacts with other brain networks differently. And it shows different patterns of activity when psychopathic people are focusing on a task like empathizing with another person.”

Specifically, the uncinate fasciculus and the cingulum show signs of degradation. These neural pathways link the emotional centers of the brain to the areas responsible for high-level decision-making and bodily regulation.

“The root problem might not be one of empathy or emotion but of something more fundamental,” Deming said. “The root problem might be in how the brain manages the heart, lungs, and other organs and prepares them to meet the demands of the current context.”

In addition to physical wiring differences, the scientists found evidence of altered functional connectivity. Functional connectivity refers to how well different areas of the brain activate together and share information during rest or active tasks. The data indicates that people with psychopathy show reduced communication between the cortex and deeper brain structures like the amygdala.

When the brain cannot properly share information between these areas, the resulting regulatory signals lack rich contextual details. The authors propose that this impairment leads to a highly context-insensitive way of regulating the body. During cognitively demanding tasks, people with psychopathy also display unusual patterns of brain activation.

Because of these altered patterns, people with psychopathy often show lower skin conductance and heart rate responses when anticipating a stressful event, such as a mild electric shock. They also tend to display abnormal hormonal regulation in response to social stressors. People with psychopathy frequently exhibit unusually high baseline levels of testosterone and oxytocin, alongside blunted cortisol responses during stressful situations.

The researchers suggest that these impoverished regulatory signals may hinder a person’s ability to allocate attention to important environmental cues. If the brain fails to properly integrate internal bodily signals with external sensory information, it struggles to identify what is actually important for survival. This failure might explain why people with psychopathy selectively focus on certain cues while entirely disregarding threats.

Taking this body-centered view also helps clarify decades of fragmented research. Historically, different scientists have proposed different core deficits for psychopathy, ranging from poor attention to a lack of fear.

“It was surprising to see how this theory might weave together previous theories about psychopathy,” Deming told PsyPost. “Scientists tend to think of these previous theories as being distant and disconnected from one another; they don’t predict or explain the same phenomena.”

Rather than seeing these older ideas as entirely separate, the researchers believe a focus on bodily regulation connects them.

“But I think most of those theories can be easily folded into our view, which says that the problem is in how the brain is sensing and regulating the body,” Deming continued. “This process is central to emotional experience, drives attention, and heavily involves the autonomic nervous system, all of which have been pointed to by prior theories as the central problem in psychopathy.”

It is important to recognize the potential misinterpretations and limitations of this theoretical framework. The model relies heavily on indirect spatial associations between past brain imaging results and known regulatory networks.

“The big caveat is that MRI findings in relation to psychopathy are all over the map,” Deming said. “Although we found some recurring findings in brain regions that are important for sensing and regulating the body, studies usually fail to replicate one another.”

Because of natural biological flexibility, a single behavioral trait might look completely different in the brain scans of two different individuals.

“One study will find lower activity in region A, while another study will find the opposite, higher activity in region A, along with lower activity in region B,” Deming explained. “Our field needs to grapple with these inconsistencies.”

To explain why previous brain imaging studies of psychopathy have been so inconsistent, Deming and Shaffer introduced two concepts.

“And while some scientists in the field point to methodological differences between studies, we proposed two new ideas in the field,” Deming said. “First, inconsistent findings could result from core dysfunction in the allostatic-interoceptive system.”

The regions managing bodily regulation sit at the very top of a neural processing hierarchy. A disruption at this high level can alter activity in many downstream sensory regions, creating the illusion of scattered, inconsistent brain abnormalities across different studies.

“This is a possibility, supported in part by a recent study from Dugré and De Brito, since this system can change activity throughout the brain depending on the current context of the body in the world,” Deming noted.

The scientists also introduced a concept called degeneracy, which is an organizing principle in biology meaning that different brain structures can achieve the exact same functional outcome.

“Second, and relatedly, brain function differs across contexts (this is called degeneracy),” he continued. “Basically, we probably shouldn’t expect findings to replicate when we’re averaging across people and across instances, and instead we should be studying individual brains regulating individual bodies in context.”

Moving forward, the scientists recommend shifting away from group-average studies and moving toward precision psychiatry. This approach involves deeply tracking individual patients across many different contexts to see how their specific brain and body interact.

“The next step is to more deeply probe how the brains of psychopathic people are sensing and regulating their bodies,” Deming said. “This is a process few studies have studied in a targeted way, and those studies mostly focused on how people perceive their heartbeat consciously.”

Researchers might test these regulatory mechanisms directly by safely manipulating a person’s internal physical signals. This could involve stimulating the vagus nerve or using ingestible vibrating capsules to alter sensations in the gut.

“But there are somewhat more hidden processes we should also be studying,” Deming explained. “For example, how do their brains integrate bodily signals with signals arriving to the eyes and ears? If we slightly alter what is happening in their heart and lungs, can we change how they process social information?”

Advancements in ultra-high field magnetic resonance imaging will likely aid these future studies by allowing scientists to see incredibly small structures in the brainstem.

“We can also start using more powerful MRI scanners to better image the small brain structures that make up the allostatic-interoceptive system,” Deming added.

Currently, there is a severe lack of evidence-based treatments that target the biological roots of psychopathy. However, interventions that directly address internal sensing, such as specific biofeedback therapies, have shown some early promise. In biofeedback training, patients observe real-time monitors of their own heart rate or brain waves and practice volitionally controlling them.

Some past biofeedback studies have successfully trained individuals with psychopathy to regulate specific brain regions connected to the allostatic network. These early interventions appeared to reduce aggressive and impulsive behaviors. By combining detailed imaging with targeted biofeedback therapies, clinicians might eventually develop personalized treatments that train patients to better monitor and regulate their internal states.

The study, “Brain evidence of allostatic and interoceptive dysfunction in psychopathy,” was authored by Philip Deming and Clare Shaffer.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/what-if-psychopathic-behavior-stems-from-a-surprisingly-basic-physical-glitch/

-------------------------------------------------

Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org

Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot

-------------------------------------------------

#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #psychopathy #allostaticinteroceptive #interoception #allostasis #brainregulation #neuroscience #biofeedback #MRI #forensicpsychology #emotiondysfunction

My anxiety about going into spaces that were bright and noisy and crowded wasn't just anxiety. They really were bright and noisy and crowded. And that hurt.
(I didn't always know about sensory sensitivities. I just knew I didn't like it, or that I got migraines.)

How was I supposed to ""just get over"" the migraine I got every time I went to the grocery store?

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #AuDHD #Anxiety #Sensory #Interoception

My anxiety about going into spaces that were bright and noisy and crowded wasn't just anxiety. They really were bright and noisy and crowded. And that hurt.
(I didn't always know about sensory sensitivities. I just knew I didn't like it, or that I got migraines.)

How was I supposed to ""just get over"" the migraine I got every time I went to the grocery store?

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #AuDHD #Anxiety #Sensory #Interoception

My anxiety about going into spaces that were bright and noisy and crowded wasn't just anxiety. They really were bright and noisy and crowded. And that hurt.
(I didn't always know about sensory sensitivities. I just knew I didn't like it, or that I got migraines.)

How was I supposed to ""just get over"" the migraine I got every time I went to the grocery store?

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #AuDHD #Anxiety #Sensory #Interoception

My anxiety about going into spaces that were bright and noisy and crowded wasn't just anxiety. They really were bright and noisy and crowded. And that hurt.
(I didn't always know about sensory sensitivities. I just knew I didn't like it, or that I got migraines.)

How was I supposed to ""just get over"" the migraine I got every time I went to the grocery store?

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #AuDHD #Anxiety #Sensory #Interoception

My anxiety about going into spaces that were bright and noisy and crowded wasn't just anxiety. They really were bright and noisy and crowded. And that hurt.
(I didn't always know about sensory sensitivities. I just knew I didn't like it, or that I got migraines.)

How was I supposed to ""just get over"" the migraine I got every time I went to the grocery store?

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #AuDHD #Anxiety #Sensory #Interoception

DATE: July 22, 2026 at 09:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------

TITLE: Physically compressing peoples’ torsos reduces the riskiness of their decisions, study finds

URL: https://www.psypost.org/physically-compressing-peoples-torsos-reduces-the-riskiness-of-their-decisions-study-finds/

A study examining the effects of torso compression (achieved by wearing shapewear) indicated that it reduces risky decisions (in an experimental game). At the same time, participants exposed to torso compression became more sensitive to sensations coming from the stomach and more aware of signals coming from the heart. The paper was published in Biological Psychology.

Good decisions depend not only on what is happening around us but also on how accurately we perceive what is happening inside our bodies. The ability to detect and interpret internal signals such as heartbeats, hunger, fullness, nausea, and fatigue is known as interoception. These bodily signals can influence emotions, behavior, and decision-making by warning us about risk, stress, or changing physical needs.

People who perceive their internal states more accurately may be less impulsive and more likely to make advantageous choices, although most evidence so far comes from studies that do not allow causal inferences. Researchers are therefore increasingly interested in whether deliberately changing bodily sensations can directly alter decisions. One possible method is body compression, because pressure from tight garments may intensify signals from the stomach or heart and draw greater attention to the body.

Stefania Polzin, a researcher affiliated with the German Institute of Human Nutrition and other institutions, and colleagues investigated the effects of torso compression on people’s cardiac interoceptive accuracy, cardiac interoceptive awareness, and gastric interoceptive sensitivity.

In other words, they investigated whether wearing garments that compress the torso—shapewear in this case—will affect accuracy in interpreting signals coming from participants’ hearts, awareness of those signals, as well as their sensitivity to signals coming from their stomach.

They also wanted to see whether this will affect their risk-taking behaviors. Study authors hypothesized that wearing shapewear will increase the perception of signals coming from the heart and stomach and decrease risk-taking. Their expectation was also that this experimentally induced improvement in sensitivity to signals from the stomach and the heart will be associated with lower risk-taking.

Study participants were 44 individuals between 18 and 45 years of age. They were required to be physically and mentally healthy, to have a normal weight, no regular intake of medication, and no prior diagnosis of mental or physical illness. They were also required to be fluent in the German language. Participants’ average age was 26 years, and 28 of them were women.

Participants were invited to the researchers’ lab in the morning (10:00 a.m.) on two consecutive days and were asked to abstain from food and water from 9:00 p.m. on the day before the visit. In the lab, they were asked to wear the clothing provided, which was a shapewear garment (in the torso compression condition) on one day, and a loose garment on the other. Shapewear is tight-fitting clothing designed to compress and smooth parts of the body, creating a slimmer or more defined appearance under other clothes.

While wearing the clothing, participants completed tasks measuring risk-decisions and interoception (cardiac interoceptive accuracy, cardiac interoceptive awareness, and gastric interoceptive sensitivity). Cardiac interoceptive accuracy is the ability to perceive the activity of the heart, specifically heartbeats. Participants completed the Heartbeat Discrimination Task. In this task, participants listened to auditory signals and reported whether the signals were in synchrony with their heartbeats.

Cardiac interoceptive awareness was assessed as the level of agreement between the actual accuracy of participants’ answers in the previous task and their self-reported confidence in the given responses being correct.

Gastric interoceptive sensitivity was defined here as the ability to perceive signals of satiety and fullness from the stomach. To assess this, participants completed the Water Load Test. In this test, participants were first asked to drink water until satiation, and then to drink until their stomachs were completely filled with water. Study authors divided the quantity a participant drank to reach satiety by the quantity of water the participant drank to reach fullness and called it satiety percentage. A smaller satiety percentage was interpreted as better gastric interoceptive ability.

Risk-taking was measured using the Columbia Card Task. In this task, there are 32 cards. Most of them earn participants points, but a small number of them are loss cards. Participants choose how many cards they would like to turn over in each trial. Trials differ in the number of loss cards, and the number of points gained per win card or lost per loss card. The number of cards chosen in each trial was an individual’s absolute risk score.

Results showed that participants were less prone to take risks while they were wearing shapewear. Also, their gastric interoceptive sensitivity and cardiac interoceptive awareness increased. Cardiac interoceptive accuracy remained unchanged.

“The increased gastric interoceptive sensitivity by compression, in turn, predicted dampened risk-behavior. Post-hoc, we observed that this was mainly driven by women, as women showed increased interoception and reduced risk-taking, whereas interoception decreased among men,” the study authors explained. “These findings demonstrate how a body manipulation alters interoception, and this causally leads to behavioral change.”

However, the researchers note that their sample was not gender-balanced and they did not set out to investigate gender differences initially, so these specific findings should be interpreted with caution.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the psychological effects of body compression. However, it should be noted that the study was conducted on a relatively small number of individuals and risk-taking decisions did not carry real consequences for the participants. Results of studies on larger samples using risk-taking decisions with real consequences for participants might differ.

The paper, “Body core compression enhances interoception leading to altered risk choices,” was authored by Stefania Polzin, Anoushiravan Zahedi, and Soyoung Q. Park.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/physically-compressing-peoples-torsos-reduces-the-riskiness-of-their-decisions-study-finds/

-------------------------------------------------

Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org

Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot

-------------------------------------------------

#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #BodyCoreCompression #Interoception #ShapewearStudy #RiskTakingReduction #CardiacInteroception #GastricInteroception #DecisionMaking #BiologicalPsychology #SexDifferences #InternalSignals

DATE: July 22, 2026 at 09:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------

TITLE: Physically compressing peoples’ torsos reduces the riskiness of their decisions, study finds

URL: https://www.psypost.org/physically-compressing-peoples-torsos-reduces-the-riskiness-of-their-decisions-study-finds/

A study examining the effects of torso compression (achieved by wearing shapewear) indicated that it reduces risky decisions (in an experimental game). At the same time, participants exposed to torso compression became more sensitive to sensations coming from the stomach and more aware of signals coming from the heart. The paper was published in Biological Psychology.

Good decisions depend not only on what is happening around us but also on how accurately we perceive what is happening inside our bodies. The ability to detect and interpret internal signals such as heartbeats, hunger, fullness, nausea, and fatigue is known as interoception. These bodily signals can influence emotions, behavior, and decision-making by warning us about risk, stress, or changing physical needs.

People who perceive their internal states more accurately may be less impulsive and more likely to make advantageous choices, although most evidence so far comes from studies that do not allow causal inferences. Researchers are therefore increasingly interested in whether deliberately changing bodily sensations can directly alter decisions. One possible method is body compression, because pressure from tight garments may intensify signals from the stomach or heart and draw greater attention to the body.

Stefania Polzin, a researcher affiliated with the German Institute of Human Nutrition and other institutions, and colleagues investigated the effects of torso compression on people’s cardiac interoceptive accuracy, cardiac interoceptive awareness, and gastric interoceptive sensitivity.

In other words, they investigated whether wearing garments that compress the torso—shapewear in this case—will affect accuracy in interpreting signals coming from participants’ hearts, awareness of those signals, as well as their sensitivity to signals coming from their stomach.

They also wanted to see whether this will affect their risk-taking behaviors. Study authors hypothesized that wearing shapewear will increase the perception of signals coming from the heart and stomach and decrease risk-taking. Their expectation was also that this experimentally induced improvement in sensitivity to signals from the stomach and the heart will be associated with lower risk-taking.

Study participants were 44 individuals between 18 and 45 years of age. They were required to be physically and mentally healthy, to have a normal weight, no regular intake of medication, and no prior diagnosis of mental or physical illness. They were also required to be fluent in the German language. Participants’ average age was 26 years, and 28 of them were women.

Participants were invited to the researchers’ lab in the morning (10:00 a.m.) on two consecutive days and were asked to abstain from food and water from 9:00 p.m. on the day before the visit. In the lab, they were asked to wear the clothing provided, which was a shapewear garment (in the torso compression condition) on one day, and a loose garment on the other. Shapewear is tight-fitting clothing designed to compress and smooth parts of the body, creating a slimmer or more defined appearance under other clothes.

While wearing the clothing, participants completed tasks measuring risk-decisions and interoception (cardiac interoceptive accuracy, cardiac interoceptive awareness, and gastric interoceptive sensitivity). Cardiac interoceptive accuracy is the ability to perceive the activity of the heart, specifically heartbeats. Participants completed the Heartbeat Discrimination Task. In this task, participants listened to auditory signals and reported whether the signals were in synchrony with their heartbeats.

Cardiac interoceptive awareness was assessed as the level of agreement between the actual accuracy of participants’ answers in the previous task and their self-reported confidence in the given responses being correct.

Gastric interoceptive sensitivity was defined here as the ability to perceive signals of satiety and fullness from the stomach. To assess this, participants completed the Water Load Test. In this test, participants were first asked to drink water until satiation, and then to drink until their stomachs were completely filled with water. Study authors divided the quantity a participant drank to reach satiety by the quantity of water the participant drank to reach fullness and called it satiety percentage. A smaller satiety percentage was interpreted as better gastric interoceptive ability.

Risk-taking was measured using the Columbia Card Task. In this task, there are 32 cards. Most of them earn participants points, but a small number of them are loss cards. Participants choose how many cards they would like to turn over in each trial. Trials differ in the number of loss cards, and the number of points gained per win card or lost per loss card. The number of cards chosen in each trial was an individual’s absolute risk score.

Results showed that participants were less prone to take risks while they were wearing shapewear. Also, their gastric interoceptive sensitivity and cardiac interoceptive awareness increased. Cardiac interoceptive accuracy remained unchanged.

“The increased gastric interoceptive sensitivity by compression, in turn, predicted dampened risk-behavior. Post-hoc, we observed that this was mainly driven by women, as women showed increased interoception and reduced risk-taking, whereas interoception decreased among men,” the study authors explained. “These findings demonstrate how a body manipulation alters interoception, and this causally leads to behavioral change.”

However, the researchers note that their sample was not gender-balanced and they did not set out to investigate gender differences initially, so these specific findings should be interpreted with caution.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the psychological effects of body compression. However, it should be noted that the study was conducted on a relatively small number of individuals and risk-taking decisions did not carry real consequences for the participants. Results of studies on larger samples using risk-taking decisions with real consequences for participants might differ.

The paper, “Body core compression enhances interoception leading to altered risk choices,” was authored by Stefania Polzin, Anoushiravan Zahedi, and Soyoung Q. Park.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/physically-compressing-peoples-torsos-reduces-the-riskiness-of-their-decisions-study-finds/

-------------------------------------------------

Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org

Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot

-------------------------------------------------

#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #BodyCoreCompression #Interoception #ShapewearStudy #RiskTakingReduction #CardiacInteroception #GastricInteroception #DecisionMaking #BiologicalPsychology #SexDifferences #InternalSignals

DATE: July 22, 2026 at 09:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------

TITLE: Physically compressing peoples’ torsos reduces the riskiness of their decisions, study finds

URL: https://www.psypost.org/physically-compressing-peoples-torsos-reduces-the-riskiness-of-their-decisions-study-finds/

A study examining the effects of torso compression (achieved by wearing shapewear) indicated that it reduces risky decisions (in an experimental game). At the same time, participants exposed to torso compression became more sensitive to sensations coming from the stomach and more aware of signals coming from the heart. The paper was published in Biological Psychology.

Good decisions depend not only on what is happening around us but also on how accurately we perceive what is happening inside our bodies. The ability to detect and interpret internal signals such as heartbeats, hunger, fullness, nausea, and fatigue is known as interoception. These bodily signals can influence emotions, behavior, and decision-making by warning us about risk, stress, or changing physical needs.

People who perceive their internal states more accurately may be less impulsive and more likely to make advantageous choices, although most evidence so far comes from studies that do not allow causal inferences. Researchers are therefore increasingly interested in whether deliberately changing bodily sensations can directly alter decisions. One possible method is body compression, because pressure from tight garments may intensify signals from the stomach or heart and draw greater attention to the body.

Stefania Polzin, a researcher affiliated with the German Institute of Human Nutrition and other institutions, and colleagues investigated the effects of torso compression on people’s cardiac interoceptive accuracy, cardiac interoceptive awareness, and gastric interoceptive sensitivity.

In other words, they investigated whether wearing garments that compress the torso—shapewear in this case—will affect accuracy in interpreting signals coming from participants’ hearts, awareness of those signals, as well as their sensitivity to signals coming from their stomach.

They also wanted to see whether this will affect their risk-taking behaviors. Study authors hypothesized that wearing shapewear will increase the perception of signals coming from the heart and stomach and decrease risk-taking. Their expectation was also that this experimentally induced improvement in sensitivity to signals from the stomach and the heart will be associated with lower risk-taking.

Study participants were 44 individuals between 18 and 45 years of age. They were required to be physically and mentally healthy, to have a normal weight, no regular intake of medication, and no prior diagnosis of mental or physical illness. They were also required to be fluent in the German language. Participants’ average age was 26 years, and 28 of them were women.

Participants were invited to the researchers’ lab in the morning (10:00 a.m.) on two consecutive days and were asked to abstain from food and water from 9:00 p.m. on the day before the visit. In the lab, they were asked to wear the clothing provided, which was a shapewear garment (in the torso compression condition) on one day, and a loose garment on the other. Shapewear is tight-fitting clothing designed to compress and smooth parts of the body, creating a slimmer or more defined appearance under other clothes.

While wearing the clothing, participants completed tasks measuring risk-decisions and interoception (cardiac interoceptive accuracy, cardiac interoceptive awareness, and gastric interoceptive sensitivity). Cardiac interoceptive accuracy is the ability to perceive the activity of the heart, specifically heartbeats. Participants completed the Heartbeat Discrimination Task. In this task, participants listened to auditory signals and reported whether the signals were in synchrony with their heartbeats.

Cardiac interoceptive awareness was assessed as the level of agreement between the actual accuracy of participants’ answers in the previous task and their self-reported confidence in the given responses being correct.

Gastric interoceptive sensitivity was defined here as the ability to perceive signals of satiety and fullness from the stomach. To assess this, participants completed the Water Load Test. In this test, participants were first asked to drink water until satiation, and then to drink until their stomachs were completely filled with water. Study authors divided the quantity a participant drank to reach satiety by the quantity of water the participant drank to reach fullness and called it satiety percentage. A smaller satiety percentage was interpreted as better gastric interoceptive ability.

Risk-taking was measured using the Columbia Card Task. In this task, there are 32 cards. Most of them earn participants points, but a small number of them are loss cards. Participants choose how many cards they would like to turn over in each trial. Trials differ in the number of loss cards, and the number of points gained per win card or lost per loss card. The number of cards chosen in each trial was an individual’s absolute risk score.

Results showed that participants were less prone to take risks while they were wearing shapewear. Also, their gastric interoceptive sensitivity and cardiac interoceptive awareness increased. Cardiac interoceptive accuracy remained unchanged.

“The increased gastric interoceptive sensitivity by compression, in turn, predicted dampened risk-behavior. Post-hoc, we observed that this was mainly driven by women, as women showed increased interoception and reduced risk-taking, whereas interoception decreased among men,” the study authors explained. “These findings demonstrate how a body manipulation alters interoception, and this causally leads to behavioral change.”

However, the researchers note that their sample was not gender-balanced and they did not set out to investigate gender differences initially, so these specific findings should be interpreted with caution.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the psychological effects of body compression. However, it should be noted that the study was conducted on a relatively small number of individuals and risk-taking decisions did not carry real consequences for the participants. Results of studies on larger samples using risk-taking decisions with real consequences for participants might differ.

The paper, “Body core compression enhances interoception leading to altered risk choices,” was authored by Stefania Polzin, Anoushiravan Zahedi, and Soyoung Q. Park.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/physically-compressing-peoples-torsos-reduces-the-riskiness-of-their-decisions-study-finds/

-------------------------------------------------

Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org

Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot

-------------------------------------------------

#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #BodyCoreCompression #Interoception #ShapewearStudy #RiskTakingReduction #CardiacInteroception #GastricInteroception #DecisionMaking #BiologicalPsychology #SexDifferences #InternalSignals

A lot of people who can't tell how much energy they have are in one of two situations.

Or they have so much awareness that it's not useful. They're hypersensitive to all sorts of feelings in their body, but it's not making meaningful connections to anything they can actually use as information.

Either they don't have internal awareness at all. It's numbed, ignored, disconnected in a variety of ways. 1/2

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #AuDHD #Neurodivergent #Interoception

A lot of people who can't tell how much energy they have are in one of two situations.

Or they have so much awareness that it's not useful. They're hypersensitive to all sorts of feelings in their body, but it's not making meaningful connections to anything they can actually use as information.

Either they don't have internal awareness at all. It's numbed, ignored, disconnected in a variety of ways. 1/2

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #AuDHD #Neurodivergent #Interoception

A lot of people who can't tell how much energy they have are in one of two situations.

Or they have so much awareness that it's not useful. They're hypersensitive to all sorts of feelings in their body, but it's not making meaningful connections to anything they can actually use as information.

Either they don't have internal awareness at all. It's numbed, ignored, disconnected in a variety of ways. 1/2

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #AuDHD #Neurodivergent #Interoception

A lot of people who can't tell how much energy they have are in one of two situations.

Or they have so much awareness that it's not useful. They're hypersensitive to all sorts of feelings in their body, but it's not making meaningful connections to anything they can actually use as information.

Either they don't have internal awareness at all. It's numbed, ignored, disconnected in a variety of ways. 1/2

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #AuDHD #Neurodivergent #Interoception

A lot of people who can't tell how much energy they have are in one of two situations.

Or they have so much awareness that it's not useful. They're hypersensitive to all sorts of feelings in their body, but it's not making meaningful connections to anything they can actually use as information.

Either they don't have internal awareness at all. It's numbed, ignored, disconnected in a variety of ways. 1/2

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #AuDHD #Neurodivergent #Interoception

Anyone else ever done this? Or is it just me? 😩

Today I decided to make noodles from scratch. Looked up 3 recipes. Decided to follow the last 1.

It took me an hour longer than planned, so I was super hungry by the time it was done.

I ate it all, thinking it was 1 serving, even though it looked like quite a lot...

I just reread the recipe: IT WAS SIX SERVINGS 💀

One of the other recipes was for 1 serving and I had mixed them up in my head.

#ADHD shit memory and shit #interoception
#Food

Anyone else ever done this? Or is it just me? 😩

Today I decided to make noodles from scratch. Looked up 3 recipes. Decided to follow the last 1.

It took me an hour longer than planned, so I was super hungry by the time it was done.

I ate it all, thinking it was 1 serving, even though it looked like quite a lot...

I just reread the recipe: IT WAS SIX SERVINGS 💀

One of the other recipes was for 1 serving and I had mixed them up in my head.

#ADHD shit memory and shit #interoception
#Food

Anyone else ever done this? Or is it just me? 😩

Today I decided to make noodles from scratch. Looked up 3 recipes. Decided to follow the last 1.

It took me an hour longer than planned, so I was super hungry by the time it was done.

I ate it all, thinking it was 1 serving, even though it looked like quite a lot...

I just reread the recipe: IT WAS SIX SERVINGS 💀

One of the other recipes was for 1 serving and I had mixed them up in my head.

#ADHD shit memory and shit #interoception
#Food

Anyone else ever done this? Or is it just me? 😩

Today I decided to make noodles from scratch. Looked up 3 recipes. Decided to follow the last 1.

It took me an hour longer than planned, so I was super hungry by the time it was done.

I ate it all, thinking it was 1 serving, even though it looked like quite a lot...

I just reread the recipe: IT WAS SIX SERVINGS 💀

One of the other recipes was for 1 serving and I had mixed them up in my head.

#ADHD shit memory and shit #interoception
#Food

Anyone else ever done this? Or is it just me? 😩

Today I decided to make noodles from scratch. Looked up 3 recipes. Decided to follow the last 1.

It took me an hour longer than planned, so I was super hungry by the time it was done.

I ate it all, thinking it was 1 serving, even though it looked like quite a lot...

I just reread the recipe: IT WAS SIX SERVINGS 💀

One of the other recipes was for 1 serving and I had mixed them up in my head.

#ADHD shit memory and shit #interoception
#Food

While fireworks can be pretty to watch, the loud and sudden sounds can be triggering. Especially when you’re Autistic or AuDHD or have sensory sensitivities. And can cause holidays like Canada Day and 4th of July to be more of a stressor than anything else. 1/3

#ActuallyAutistic #AuDHD #Autistic #Neurodiversity #Sensory #Interoception #Fireworks

While fireworks can be pretty to watch, the loud and sudden sounds can be triggering. Especially when you’re Autistic or AuDHD or have sensory sensitivities. And can cause holidays like Canada Day and 4th of July to be more of a stressor than anything else. 1/3

#ActuallyAutistic #AuDHD #Autistic #Neurodiversity #Sensory #Interoception #Fireworks

While fireworks can be pretty to watch, the loud and sudden sounds can be triggering. Especially when you’re Autistic or AuDHD or have sensory sensitivities. And can cause holidays like Canada Day and 4th of July to be more of a stressor than anything else. 1/3

#ActuallyAutistic #AuDHD #Autistic #Neurodiversity #Sensory #Interoception #Fireworks

While fireworks can be pretty to watch, the loud and sudden sounds can be triggering. Especially when you’re Autistic or AuDHD or have sensory sensitivities. And can cause holidays like Canada Day and 4th of July to be more of a stressor than anything else. 1/3

#ActuallyAutistic #AuDHD #Autistic #Neurodiversity #Sensory #Interoception #Fireworks

While fireworks can be pretty to watch, the loud and sudden sounds can be triggering. Especially when you’re Autistic or AuDHD or have sensory sensitivities. And can cause holidays like Canada Day and 4th of July to be more of a stressor than anything else. 1/3

#ActuallyAutistic #AuDHD #Autistic #Neurodiversity #Sensory #Interoception #Fireworks

There are all sorts of things I'd built up anxiety around throughout my life where there was actually an underlying concrete sensory issue I hadn't recognized as such.

Showering. Brushing my teeth. Leaving the house. Certain chores I avoided without understanding why. 1/2

#ActuallyAutistic #BurnoutRecovery #Sensory #Interoception

There are all sorts of things I'd built up anxiety around throughout my life where there was actually an underlying concrete sensory issue I hadn't recognized as such.

Showering. Brushing my teeth. Leaving the house. Certain chores I avoided without understanding why. 1/2

#ActuallyAutistic #BurnoutRecovery #Sensory #Interoception

There are all sorts of things I'd built up anxiety around throughout my life where there was actually an underlying concrete sensory issue I hadn't recognized as such.

Showering. Brushing my teeth. Leaving the house. Certain chores I avoided without understanding why. 1/2

#ActuallyAutistic #BurnoutRecovery #Sensory #Interoception

There are all sorts of things I'd built up anxiety around throughout my life where there was actually an underlying concrete sensory issue I hadn't recognized as such.

Showering. Brushing my teeth. Leaving the house. Certain chores I avoided without understanding why. 1/2

#ActuallyAutistic #BurnoutRecovery #Sensory #Interoception

There are all sorts of things I'd built up anxiety around throughout my life where there was actually an underlying concrete sensory issue I hadn't recognized as such.

Showering. Brushing my teeth. Leaving the house. Certain chores I avoided without understanding why. 1/2

#ActuallyAutistic #BurnoutRecovery #Sensory #Interoception

Mes sept merveilles du monde

Si je vous demandais d’établir la liste de ce que vous considérez comme les sept plus grandes merveilles du monde, à quoi penseriez-vous ?

Vous pourriez me parler des chutes du Niagara, de la banquise dans le Grand Nord, de la forêt qui a enveloppé votre enfance, d’un lever de soleil, d’un vieux quartier ou de la mer…

Toutefois, en général, nous finissons par évoquer ce que l’histoire a retenu, soit la liste antique dressée par Antipater de Sidon vers 140 av. J.-C. :

la pyramide de Kheops de Gizeh, en Égypte (seule merveille encore debout aujourd’hui)

les jardins suspendus de Babylone, en Irak

la statue chryséléphantine de Zeus en majesté dans le temple d’Olympie, en Grèce

le temple d’Artémis à Éphèse, appelé aussi l’Artémision, en Turquie

le tombeau de Mausole, dit le Mausolée, à Halicarnasse, en Turquie

la statue de bronze d’Hélios, dite le Colosse de Rhodes en Grèce

la tour fanal de Pharos, dite le Phare d’Alexandrie en Égypte

En 2007, une nouvelle liste des sept merveilles a été établie par un vote mondial auprès de 100 millions de personnes, soit :

La Grande muraille de Chine

La cité de Pétra en Jordanie

La statue du Christ rédempteur au Brésil

Le site de Machu Picchu au Pérou

Le site de Chichén Itzá au Mexique

Le Colisée de Rome en Italie

Le Taj Mahal en Inde

Toutefois, pour moi, il y a tellement de merveilles < découvrir dans le monde, grâce à mes sept merveilles :

la vision

l’ouïe

le toucher

le goût

l’odorat

la proprioception

l’intéroception — la perception de l’intérieur du corps

Une chanson de Richard Séguin interprétée par Bori – C’est plein de vie

Les paroles sur https://genius.com/Richard-seguin-cest-plein-de-vie-lyrics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBZnvVhyzM0&list=RDeBZnvVhyzM0&start_radio=1

Par Daniel Jean dans Voies (x) de passage

COPYRIGHT – DROIT DE REPRODUCTION – La reproduction de cet article sur un blogue ou un site est autorisé à condition de respecter :   * L’intégralité du texte — Vous ne devez pas modifier, transformer ou adapter ce texte. * Le droit d’auteur — Vous devez citer le nom de la source (avec un hyperlien vers l’article original de préférence). * La finalité sans but lucratif — Vous n’avez pas le droit d’utiliser cette création à des fins commerciales. Si j’ai utilisé vos textes/photos et que vous souhaitez que je les retire, merci de me contacter en commentaire, ce sera fait rapidement.

New preprint: I propose epiphanesthesia as a candidate third functional category of interoceptive content, distinct from homeostatic and affective signals, with a neurobiological hypothesis and four falsifiable predictions involving a dissociation in high-alexithymia individuals.

Critical reading welcome before peer review. Boost toward interoception/alexithymia researchers appreciated.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20700796

#Interoception #Alexithymia #Preprint #ActuallyAutistic #Neurodiversity #AuDHD

New preprint: I propose epiphanesthesia as a candidate third functional category of interoceptive content, distinct from homeostatic and affective signals, with a neurobiological hypothesis and four falsifiable predictions involving a dissociation in high-alexithymia individuals.

Critical reading welcome before peer review. Boost toward interoception/alexithymia researchers appreciated.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20700796

#Interoception #Alexithymia #Preprint #ActuallyAutistic #Neurodiversity #AuDHD

New preprint: I propose epiphanesthesia as a candidate third functional category of interoceptive content, distinct from homeostatic and affective signals, with a neurobiological hypothesis and four falsifiable predictions involving a dissociation in high-alexithymia individuals.

Critical reading welcome before peer review. Boost toward interoception/alexithymia researchers appreciated.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20700796

#Interoception #Alexithymia #Preprint #ActuallyAutistic #Neurodiversity #AuDHD

New preprint: I propose epiphanesthesia as a candidate third functional category of interoceptive content, distinct from homeostatic and affective signals, with a neurobiological hypothesis and four falsifiable predictions involving a dissociation in high-alexithymia individuals.

Critical reading welcome before peer review. Boost toward interoception/alexithymia researchers appreciated.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20700796

#Interoception #Alexithymia #Preprint #ActuallyAutistic #Neurodiversity #AuDHD

New preprint: I propose epiphanesthesia as a candidate third functional category of interoceptive content, distinct from homeostatic and affective signals, with a neurobiological hypothesis and four falsifiable predictions involving a dissociation in high-alexithymia individuals.

Critical reading welcome before peer review. Boost toward interoception/alexithymia researchers appreciated.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20700796

#Interoception #Alexithymia #Preprint #ActuallyAutistic #Neurodiversity #AuDHD