Body Perception Questionnaire (BPQ)
A self-report instrument developed by Stephen Porges (1993) to measure awareness of, and perceived reactivity of, one’s own bodily and autonomic processes. It has been present in the wiki secondhand across many pages — cited in interoceptive-taxonomy, quadt-2018-interoception-health-disease, harrison-2021-breathing-interoception-anxiety, dubois-2016-autism-interoception and others — without a page of its own; it gets one with the Wiebking et al. (2010) ingest, which uses it as its main behavioural measure.
Where it sits in the taxonomy
The BPQ measures sensibility — self-reported, belief-laden report about the body — and not accuracy (task performance) or awareness (metacognitive correspondence, in Garfinkel et al.’s sense, despite the name of its own “awareness” subscale). This matters because the wiki repeatedly finds that sensibility and accuracy dissociate, and that the sensibility/report dimension is the one that most often tracks affect and psychopathology. The BPQ is a sibling of the MAIA: both are self-report, both split into subscales, both should be read as measures of how a person relates to the body rather than how well they sense it.
The subscale structure earns its keep
The instrument’s usefulness is that its subscales can come apart. Its four components — conscious body awareness (45 items), stress-response awareness (10 items), autonomic-nervous-system reactivity (27 items), and stress style (12 items) — do not always move together, and a study that reports only the total can miss the informative pattern. Wiebking et al. is the wiki’s clean example: depressed patients scored higher than controls on total, stress-response, autonomic-reactivity and stress-style, but not on the awareness subscale — an elevation of perceived bodily reactivity without an elevation of bodily awareness. The depressed body is more preoccupying and more reactive-feeling, not more accurately sensed. Any use of a BPQ total would have averaged that dissociation away.
The confound to hold
Because the reactivity subscales ask a person to report how strongly their body responds to stress, an elevated score in an anxious or depressed sample is hard to separate from the distress itself — symptom preoccupation, negative affect and anxiety all inflate self-reported bodily reactivity. So a group difference on the BPQ is evidence of altered bodily report, which is compatible with altered interoception but also with the mood state doing the reporting. This is the same caution the wiki attaches to every sensibility measure, and it is why Wiebking et al.’s neural decoupling result (body report present but decorrelated from insula activity in depression) is more informative than the raw BPQ elevation on its own.
Provenance note
The BPQ comes out of Porges’s autonomic/polyvagal programme — it was built to make claims about autonomic state testable by self-report — which is worth knowing when reading its reactivity subscales, since they are framed around the autonomic-nervous-system constructs that programme is organized by. Its adoption across the interoception literature is largely independent of the fate of polyvagal theory; it functions as a general body-sensibility scale.