Research gap at a glance
- Question: Does the quality of early caregiving prospectively predict children’s later interoception, and does it affect the felt signal itself or only the child’s trust in and report of it?
- Why it matters: The social-origins account says core feelings such as hunger and warmth are built through caregiver interaction, which would make interoception partly a developmental and social achievement and frame adult body-awareness training as partly remedial. The claim’s own originator describes it as untested.
- Theme: Development and aging
- Status: open
What the wiki already knows
- Fotopoulou and Tsakiris propose that caregivers infer and regulate the infant’s hidden bodily states and that the infant learns its own interoceptive sensations through these interactions; Oldroyd et al. state the strong form that the origins of core feelings are social not biological (Social origins of interoception, Oldroyd et al. (2019)).
- Tsakiris writes that when and how interoceptive awareness emerges in early life remains unexplored and attributes this to limited measures for children (Quigley et al. (2021), Manos Tsakiris).
- Maternal rejection of negative emotion predicted lower physiology congruence in youth, but the data are cross-sectional and every social-side measure routes through self-report, so a deficit in feeling cannot be separated from a deficit in trusting or reporting (Oldroyd et al. (2019), Are the origins of interoception social or biological?).
- The sharpest test, whether severely neglected children show anomalies in hunger or thermal feeling itself, has no source in the wiki (Are the origins of interoception social or biological?).
- A dedicated, congenital afferent system for caregiver-like touch supports a social route while cutting against the strong social reading (Affective touch (C-tactile afferents)).
What would answer it
- Follow a birth cohort with repeated observational measures of caregiver sensitivity and mirroring and repeated interoceptive measures (report-free in infancy, psychophysical later), alongside a group of children who experienced severe early deprivation, and test whether caregiving predicts later detection accuracy or only later self-report and congruence.
Connections
- Raised on: Are the origins of interoception social or biological?, Social origins of interoception, Oldroyd et al. (2019), Quigley et al. (2021), Manos Tsakiris
- Related concepts: Social origins of interoception, Attachment style, Early adverse life events, Affective touch (C-tactile afferents)
- Related debates: Are the origins of interoception social or biological?
Are the origins of interoception social or biological? describes itself as under-determined by evidence: no source in the wiki tests it. Every claim on the social side is cross-sectional, and the field’s own precondition, a reliable way of measuring interoception across the lifespan, is unmet (see How can interoception be measured in people who cannot report it verbally?).
The debate page separates two versions of the claim that a study must tell apart. The strong version predicts a deficit in feeling: poorly attuned caregiving leaves a child less able to detect bodily signals. The weak version predicts a deficit in trusting or admitting the feeling. Self-report and self-report-physiology congruence cannot distinguish them, which is why the design needs a detection measure with a correct answer as soon as children can do one.
The severe-deprivation comparison is the most informative contrast available. If caregiving constitutes core feelings, profound early neglect should alter hunger or thermal feeling itself, not only its report. Early adverse life events records rodent maternal-deprivation work showing visceral hypersensitivity, which gives the prediction a biological reference point, but no human source here tests it.