Ren Palmer
Academic and research departments
Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, School of Psychology, Health Psychology research group.About
My research project
Toward Better Measurement of InteroceptionMy research explores how we sense and interpret signals from inside our bodies, known as interoception. Interoception plays a vital role in emotion, decision-making, and mental health. This project will refine existing cardiac interoception tasks, test the stability of interoceptive abilities over time and under physiological manipulation, and develop new measures to assess how much people rely on internal bodily signals to guide their behaviour.
Supervisors
My research explores how we sense and interpret signals from inside our bodies, known as interoception. Interoception plays a vital role in emotion, decision-making, and mental health. This project will refine existing cardiac interoception tasks, test the stability of interoceptive abilities over time and under physiological manipulation, and develop new measures to assess how much people rely on internal bodily signals to guide their behaviour.
University roles and responsibilities
- Graduate Teaching Assistant
My qualifications
Publications
Interoceptive accuracy, the ability to correctly perceive internal body signals such as heartbeats, has been empirically and theoretically linked to stress. However, issues with the measurement of both interoceptive accuracy and stress have led to lack of clarity regarding this relationship. This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to clarify whether interoceptive accuracy is associated with different facets of stress, including - physical, cognitive and self-reported stressors and the physiological stress response. A systematic search identified 2014 abstracts. Twenty-eight authors were contacted to request data for eligible studies, which yielded a final sample of 20 studies. Results revealed a positive association between heartbeat counting task (HCT) performance and acute physical stressors, and a negative association between HCT performance and physiological stress responses. No significant relationships were observed between stress and interoceptive accuracy assessed by the heartbeat discrimination task. While these findings offer tentative support for stress–interoceptive accuracy associations, they must be interpreted with caution given substantial heterogeneity in stress measures, limited use of interoception tasks beyond the HCT, and ongoing concerns regarding task validity. Implications for future research and methodological recommendations are discussed.
Interoception is broadly defined as the processing of internal bodily states at multiple conscious and preconscious levels (Brewer et al., 2021). Because of the breadth of this construct, many measures exist to probe individual differences in interoception (Desmedt et al., 2023; Khalsa et al., 2018). Measures of interoception can be separated into different domains (e.g., cardiac, respiratory, gastric) and dimensions (e.g., accuracy, attention). Some of the most assessed domains of interoception, and associated measures, are reviewed below. We focus on interoceptive accuracy, as well as self-reported, implicit and neural measures of interoception, however, it should be noted that there are many other dimensions (Khalsa et al., 2018). Specific considerations for the measurement of stress alongside interoception are provided.