Is more interoceptive awareness better?
A debate the wiki had been having on at least five pages without a page of its own. It is created here because Lyons et al. (2021) made the collision explicit: two papers using the same instrument, one lineage apart, read reduced felt bodily emotion as benign in one population and pathological in another.
The collision
| source | population | finding | verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| volynets-2020-cultural-universality | ageing adults, 18–90 | felt bodily emotion dampens with age | good — easier regulation, higher life satisfaction |
| lyons-2021-body-maps-depression | major depression | felt bodily emotion is weaker (but see caveat) | bad — increase body awareness in treatment |
| antidepressant-emotional-blunting | medicated MDD | felt bodily emotion turns to deactivation | unwanted — patients complain of numbness |
| oldroyd-2019-attachment-interoception | attachment-anxious | heightened noticing and emotional awareness | bad — hypervigilance, low not-worrying |
| farb-2015-interoception-contemplative-health | anorexia nervosa | awareness training raises bodily contact | bad initially — increases maladaptive behaviour |
| farb-2015-interoception-contemplative-health | general/wellbeing | contemplative training raises contact | good — but selectively, never maximally |
Read down the “verdict” column and the naive dose-response reading dies. More is sometimes good, sometimes bad; less is sometimes good, sometimes bad. Both extremes have a pathology attached: the anxious hypervigilant end and the numbed/dissociated end.
The two candidate resolutions
1. It is an inverted U. There is an optimal band of interoceptive contact, and both tails are dysfunctional — hypervigilance above, numbness below. Attractive, and consistent with the table, but no source in this wiki tests it: nobody has measured interoceptive contact and wellbeing across a full range in one sample and looked for curvature. It is currently a shape imposed on a scatter of studies, not a finding.
2. The question is malformed, because “interoceptive awareness” is not one thing. This is the stronger reply, and it is Farb et al.’s whole point. Sort the rows above by which construct is actually being measured and the contradiction thins:
- Volynets measures the intensity of a state report — how much body gets coloured. Less signal.
- Oldroyd measures sensibility via maia — beliefs about one’s interoceptive style. More attention, worse relationship.
- Farb’s training targets regulation — the relationship to the signal, “without necessarily changing it.”
- The heartbeat-detection-task literature measures accuracy, which meditators famously do not improve (Khalsa et al. 2008; Parkin et al. 2013) despite improving on everything else.
Under this reading, “less signal” (Volynets) and “better relationship to signal” (Farb) are not competing answers to one question; they are answers to different questions that share a word. An older adult with a quieter body and a good relationship to it, and an anxious young adult with a loud body and a frightened relationship to it, can both be doing well or badly depending on the term you pick — and the interoceptive-taxonomy predicts exactly this dissociability.
What would actually settle it
The reason to keep this open rather than dissolve it into (2): resolution 2 explains away the appearance of disagreement but leaves the clinical question standing. Farb et al. and Lyons et al. both recommend body-awareness training for depressed patients; Farb et al. also warn it can be harmful in severe and suicidal depression, whom Lyons et al. excluded. Two papers recommending the same intervention for adjacent populations, one of which says the intervention is dangerous for the population the other did not study, is a live disagreement no amount of taxonomy tidies away.
Discriminating tests the wiki does not have:
- A dose-response or curvature analysis of interoceptive contact against wellbeing within a single sample — the direct test of resolution 1.
- Any study that moves one taxonomy construct while holding the others fixed — the direct test of resolution 2.
- Whether the ageing decline Volynets et al. observe is the same quantity that body-awareness training raises. If ageing reduces signal while training changes relationship-to-signal, they never touched.
- Whether blunting is iatrogenic numbness or successful downregulation. Patients call it a side effect; a strict “less is more” position predicts they should feel better for it.
Caveats on the evidence, recorded so this page does not overclaim
The Lyons row is the weakest of the six. Its “less activation in depression” claim rests almost entirely on a single fear cell in a table whose ratio columns are transposed, and disappears when fear is excluded — see the arithmetic note on lyons-2021-body-maps-depression. What survives from that paper is the recommendation (body awareness as a treatment target) and the medication finding, not a clean demonstration that depression blunts the felt body.
The Volynets row is a proposal, not a result: the age effect is real (rs = 0.11, cross-sectional) but the chain from it to “easier to regulate” to “increased life satisfaction of old age” is speculation the authors offer in a discussion section, resting on Scheibe & Carstensen (2010) and Urry & Gross (2010) rather than on their own data.
So this debate is at present a collision of two well-measured findings and two under-evidenced interpretations of them. That is worth a page — the interpretations are what the applied literature runs on.