Interaction between interoception and bodily self experience
Final Report Abstract
The present project, conducted at the Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, investigated the relationship between interoception, i.e., the perception of physiological processes from the inner body, and experimentally induced dissociative out-ofbody experiences in healthy subjects. In several experiments, we found that the majority of participants can be induced to feel separated from their physical body. This proneness was significantly negatively associated with interoceptive accuracy (i.e., the objectifiable performance in interoceptive discrimination) which was even pronounced in people with high interoceptive awareness (i.e., the metacognitive awareness of interoceptive accuracy). In an operant training procedure, we further showed that interoceptive accuracy is trainable, while interoceptive awareness appears to be a relatively stable trait. Accordingly, the effects on bodily self-experiences are rather small. An originally proposed functional magnetic resonance imaging study was skipped due to these small effects. Instead, the applicant was involved in another study on the interaction of interoception and immersion in virtual reality. The results, obtained in healthy participants, might have important theoretical implications for the understanding of the interactions between interoception and bodily self-awareness. Furthermore, the findings might have clinical implications for mental disorders accompanied by dissociative body experiences and its psychotherapeutic treatment.
