Karen S. Quigley

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. 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.