Interoception, Emotional Competence, and Integrous Decision Making

Last month I introduced the concept of Interoception, one’s ability to feel internal physiological signals within the body. You can read that blog post here.

This time I’d love to share an excerpt from a paper exploring the relationship between interoception, emotional competence, decision making, and learning. The paper goes on to explain that “indeed, existing research indicates an association between low interoceptive sensitivity and alexithymia (a difficulty identifying one’s own emotion), underscoring the link between bodily and emotional awareness.” :

“A significant role for interoception in higher-order cognition is supported by empirical evidence demonstrating that interoceptive ability predicts competence in a variety of emotional domains as well as in learning and decision-making. Within the affective domain, interoception appears to be necessary for all aspects of emotional processing. Much of this evidence utilizes an individual differences approach to demonstrate that, across individuals, interoceptive sensitivity is correlated with emotional stability, emotion regulation, and emotional intensity (the tendency to experience more extreme emotions with greater awareness and depth of experience). Indeed, the vast majority of current theories of emotion suggest that both interoceptive signals and cognitive evaluation of one’s internal and external environment contribute towards emotional experience.

Within learning and decision-making, most classic theories of learning apportion a crucial role to signals of punishment and reward, making the accurate perception and recognition of these signals as fundamental to learning. Equally fundamental are theories of value in decision-making − where the aim of decision-making is to select the option with the highest value. It is clear that value may be impacted by interoceptive state (the value of water is higher when dehydrated than when not), or be interoceptive in nature (as in the drive for primary reinforcers such as sex and food).

Some theories ascribe a more fundamental role to interoception by suggesting that decision-making is guided by stored representations of the bodily consequences of stimuli and responses. These stored representations, provided they can be perceived, are a further source of information when calculating the value of options. Regardless of one’s theoretical standpoint, however, it is clear that accurate perception and recognition of interoceptive signals is necessary for learning and decision-making.”

source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187892931630127X