Putting the Body Back Together: A Functional Autonomic Model of Interoception

The ability to sense the internal state of one's body is the process of interoception and is a marker for positive emotional outcomes. The last five years have seen burgeoning research interest in interoception, including a call for more integrative and predictive biomarkers for interoceptive ability. While there is a robust literature purporting to measure interoception, there is also significant research challenging the content validity of the current methodology. Beyond these published challenges, I offer a broader critique that suggests that the current reductionist approach fails to capture the integrative nature of interoception. I introduce an alternate methodology to assess interoceptive ability that leverages the integrative nature of the autonomic nervous system. Thirty-four undergraduates provided real-time feedback about their subjective state of arousal while watching three videos of varying intensity. Across subjects, arousal feedback did not positively correlate with physiological indices of sympathetic arousal including electrodermal activity and the inverse of pre-ejection period. However, each subject appeared to have an idiographic pattern of physiological variables that correlated strongly, although often negatively, with the subjective slider feedback. These physiological patterns provide the foundation for investigating a new biomarker for interoception that relies on the autonomic nervous system to surmise interoceptive states.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Psychology

Department dc:contributor.department

Psychology

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Nackley, Brittany Burch

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Scarpa-Friedman, Bruce H.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Jones, Russell T.
• Ollendick, Thomas H.
• Bell, Martha Ann

• interoception
• autonomic nervous system
• functional autonomic model
• time series
• novelty-habituation pattern

Statement dc:rights

• Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:34969

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/110592