Researcher at a glance
- Affiliation: Department of Psychology, Northeastern University; Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial VA Hospital, Bedford, MA
- Orientation: Psychophysiology of emotion in the constructionist tradition (Barrett lineage); somatovisceral afference; social interoception and affective touch
Key contributions
- Lead author of the functional survey of interoception (Quigley et al. 2021) — the TICS 2021 special issue’s answer to ‘what is interoception for?’, spanning energy regulation, memory, affect and self.
- With Mary Burleson, the ‘social interoception and social allostasis through touch’ proposal (2019), which extends Cacioppo & Berntson’s somatovisceral afference model of emotion to affective touch — the source of the review’s central methodological suggestion.
- Presses the case that the field’s evidential weakness is anatomical in origin: interoceptive afferents are thin, unmyelinated and diffusely arrayed, so human work is correlational by necessity rather than by choice.
- Argues for widening ‘multisensory integration’ to include interoceptive modalities, making interoception a party to perceptual integration rather than a separate channel.
Key papers
- Quigley et al. (2021) — Quigley, Kanoski, Grill, Barrett & Tsakiris (2021), Trends in Neurosciences 44(1):29-38.
- Burleson, M. H. & Quigley, K. S. (2019). Social interoception and social allostasis through touch: legacy of the somatovisceral afference model of emotion. Social Neuroscience. (Not in raw/; the source of the affective-touch proposal.)
Connections
A psychophysiologist in the Barrett orbit at Northeastern, with a VA affiliation, entering the wiki as lead author of Quigley et al. (2021).
What she is doing in this review
Two of the paper’s distinctive moves are hers rather than the co-authors’ specialities, and both are methodological rather than theoretical.
Naming the anatomical cause of the field’s evidential weakness. The review returns four times to the point that interoceptive afferents cannot be stimulated or recorded by standard peripheral-nerve methods because of what they are made of. The wiki has recorded the symptom on nearly every page — the cardiac task monoculture, the empty biomarker cupboard, the correlational clinical literature — without stating the cause this directly.
Proposing a way out via Affective touch (C-tactile afferents). This traces to Burleson & Quigley (2019), her own extension of the Cacioppo & Berntson somatovisceral afference model. The argument is that C-tactile afferents share interoceptive fibre morphology and central projection (dorsal posterior insula, not S1/S2) while being in the skin, hence accessible to brush stimulation and Microneurography. If it holds, it gives the field a manipulation. The wiki holds it as a well-motivated proposal resting on a single-patient anatomical result (Olausson et al. 2002) and sourced to her own prior paper.
Position
Constructionist by affiliation and by the review’s theoretical sections, which are recognisably Barrett’s (Allostasis as the ground, Core affect as the readout, interoception as “not specific to emotional events”). But Quigley’s own contribution is not a position in the wiki’s theoretical debates — it is an argument about what would have to be true methodologically for those debates to be settled. Filed accordingly: a methodologist in a theorist’s paper.
Her VA affiliation and the Army Research Institute funding on this review are worth noting only as context; no military-relevant claims appear in the paper.