Interoceptive propensity

Proposed by Murphy in her 2022 commentary on the Suksasilp & Garfinkel (2022) model. Every construct on interoceptive-taxonomy — across all five taxonomies — is a property of perception: the strength of the afferent signal, the accuracy of its detection, the confidence attached to it, where attention points. Propensity is the property those lists omit: whether a person actually deploys a signal they can perceive.

Ability vs use

A signal can be perceived accurately and still go unused; a signal can be leaned on heavily whether or not it is perceived well. Murphy’s claim is that the degree of use is a stable, consequential individual difference, and that it factors into three:

1. General propensity — internal-vs-external cue weighting for gauging internal states. This is the external axis recast as a person-level disposition.
2. Process-specific reliance — how far the body is weighted for a particular job (emotion, hunger, intuitive decision), which need not be constant across jobs.
3. Adaptiveness — whether deploying the signal helps, which depends on the person’s interoceptive insight and the task.

Use is downstream of ability but not reducible to it. What shapes use, per Murphy: signal strength/reliability, beliefs about one’s own accuracy (a distrusted signal is discarded), and directed attention (a signal attended is more likely deployed). The first two connect to interoceptive-sensitivity and to the sensibility/belief cluster that Ventura-Bort et al. and Banellis et al. found generalizes independently of ability.

Why it is not an intrinsic good

Propensity has no fixed valence, which is what distinguishes it from the implicit “more contact is better” of the applied literature. Murphy grounds this in Dunn et al. (2010): interoceptive accuracy helped decisions only when bodily cues favoured advantageous options. Read through propensity, using the body more is a gain term — it amplifies whatever the body signals, right or wrong. Over-use with poor insight (trusting an unreliable signal) and under-use with poor insight (discarding a reliable one) are both failure modes. The sex-difference pattern is her cleanest case: women show poorer lab interoceptive accuracy yet better emotion recognition, so for some processes weighting non-interoceptive cues is the superior policy. See is-more-interoceptive-awareness-better.

Trait or state, and the missing instrument

Murphy leaves open whether propensity is a trait or a state — and if a state, then knowing when to use the body becomes its own meaningful difference. This is state-vs-trait-interoception’s question, posed for use rather than perception, and posed before any measure exists. The proposed routes to measurement all isolate cue-use by holding the internal signal fixed and varying external-cue availability: naturalistic-vs-lab comparison at the individual level (Cox et al. 1985), or lab tasks that manipulate access to external cues (Murphy, Catmur & Bird 2018). None has been built for propensity specifically.

Relation to the efferent gap

Propensity sits beside interoceptive-control as the wiki’s second construct about what the person does with interoception rather than what they sense. interoceptive-taxonomy records that almost every taxonomic construct is afferent, with Farb’s regulation the lone efferent term; propensity adds a second non-perceptual axis — not driving the body to a state, but choosing whether to consult it at all. Both are theorised heavily and measured barely, for the same reason: the field’s instruments read signals, and neither deploying-a-signal nor acting-on-a-channel is a signal to read.

Status

A proposed construct with no validated measure and an open trait/state status. Its value to the wiki is diagnostic: it names the deployment dimension that the accuracy/sensibility/awareness apparatus has repeatedly gestured at (the belief and attention components that keep dissociating from ability) without ever isolating.