Age-related interoceptive decline

The developmental axis that runs downward. Where social-origins-of-interoception asks how interoception is built in infancy, this asks what happens to it afterwards.

The finding so far

Volynets et al. (2020) is the wiki’s first source on it, and the effect is incidental to that paper’s main claim — which makes it more interesting, not less: age was the only background variable that substantially moved bodily sensation maps once culture, language, sex, education and BMI were all in the same model.

Across ages 18–90 (N = 3954), felt bodily sensation dampened for every emotion. Map intensity correlated negatively with age for anger, fear, disgust, happiness, surprise, anxiety, love, contempt, pride, shame and jealousy, and positively for depression and sadness — which is dampening too, since those two are carried by deactivation (negative map values), so a positive correlation means the felt loss of activity also shrinks. Subjectwise mean absolute intensity fell with age at rs = 0.11 (p < 0.001): reliable, and small.

Note the structure of the result: what changes with age is intensity, not topography. The maps stay the same shape and lose contrast. Emotions are still felt in the same places; they are felt less.

The lifespan arc

Combined with Hietanen et al. (2015), where children’s bodily maps become progressively more discrete toward adulthood, the group proposes: sharpen, then fade. Both legs are cross-sectional, so both are equally open to cohort explanations — a 70-year-old and a 20-year-old differ in more than age, including in how they use a colouring interface.

Why it might matter (proposed, not tested)

Volynets et al. offer a chain of speculation worth recording because it is testable and because it inverts a familiar finding:

• Basal metabolism and physiological reactivity slow with age (Schofield 1985); limbic reactivity falls, prefrontal activity rises, cardiovascular response slows.
• So there is less bodily signal — and perhaps weaker interoceptive access to it — to feel.
• This could explain why subjective and physiological emotional responses decouple in ageing (Scheibe & Carstensen 2010).
• And it could explain why older adults regulate emotion better (Urry & Gross 2010): “due to weakened interoceptive awareness, they may become less connected to the bodily components of emotions, and this shift of emotions towards ‘cognitive’ as opposed to embodied processes might make the emotions easier to regulate.”

That last inference deserves flagging as a tension with the rest of this wiki rather than an extension of it. The contemplative and clinical literature here treats more interoceptive contact as the route to wellbeing — see mindfulness-interoceptive-training and farb-2015-interoception-contemplative-health. Volynets et al. propose that less of it may underlie the increased life satisfaction and emotional wellbeing of old age. Both cannot be straightforwardly right, and the resolution probably lies in the interoceptive-taxonomy — attention and sensibility are not sensitivity, and “less signal” is not “better relationship to signal.”

Update (Lyons ingest). This tension now has a page of its own — is-more-interoceptive-awareness-better — and its first adjacent source. Lyons et al. (2021) ran the same instrument in depression, found reduced felt bodily emotion, and drew the opposite moral: that body awareness should be increased in treatment. Same measure, same direction of effect, opposite valuation.

Two things that does and does not settle:

• It does not refute the ageing proposal. Depression and healthy ageing are different states, and “less felt body is bad in depression” is consistent with “less felt body is fine at 75.” A defender of Volynets can say the quieting is benign when it tracks a genuinely quieter body and pathological when it tracks withdrawal from a body that is still signalling.
• It does sharpen what the ageing proposal owes us. If reduced interoceptive contact were generically regulation-friendly, depression and antidepressant blunting should look like emotional competence rather than complaints. They do not. So the beneficial-quieting story needs a reason why ageing’s version is the good kind — and Volynets et al. do not supply one, because the mechanism they invoke (less signal → emotion shifts toward the cognitive → easier to regulate) is not specific to ageing at all.

The Aging folder (Khalsa, “Interoceptive awareness declines with age”; “Aging bodies, aging emotions”) remains queued and remains the thing that should substantially revise this page.