The Role Of Interoceptive Awareness In Affect And Related Mental Faculties

描述(申请人提供)：你饿了吗？累的?悲伤的?这些体验都依赖于从身体发送到大脑的“内感”感觉。感觉间感觉可以被体验为身体的自我平衡要求(例如，对食物、饮料、休息的需要)，或者作为一种以愉悦-不愉快的感觉为特征的情感状态，并具有一定程度的唤醒。反过来，情感无缝地融入到正常的感知和决策中。此外，由于情感的来源在日常生活中没有被发现，很容易将情感错误地归因于虚假的来源，这可能会导致不健康的行为模式(例如，工作中争吵的不适可能被误认为饥饿的不适，并可能导致暴饮暴食)。此外，除了是健康精神生活的核心外，在许多精神疾病中，如躯体形式障碍、抑郁、焦虑和成瘾，以及在涉及神经疾病的身体疾病中，如糖尿病，内部感觉和情感处理都会严重改变。虽然内感和情感加工的各个方面是相关的，但在这些关系中，关于因果关系的知识严重缺乏。这里, 这一障碍是通过使用两种训练方法来提高健康年轻人的内感敏感性的实验方法来解决的，并通过比较训练前后情感加工的三个方面的测量来解决这一障碍：(I)对唤起的图像的情感判断，(Ii)对唤起的图像的反应的生理反应，以及(Iii)在人的知觉过程中情感被错误归因化的程度。为了增强内感敏感性，研究1使用传统的心跳检测训练，而研究2使用一种新的方法，实时功能磁共振成像神经反馈，以增强参与内感的右前岛的大脑活动。在这两项研究中，将使用心跳检测任务在训练前和训练后评估内感敏感性。 此外，为了针对每个个体的需要量身定做内感敏感性训练，研究1探索了两套训练指令，它们可以调节个体是否将内感感觉体验为(A)“情绪感觉”或(B)“身体感觉”(例如，躯体形式障碍患者在体验“身体感觉”方面有不健康的偏见，因此将从“情绪感觉”训练中受益)。实现这些目标将为未来的研究提供指导，这些研究旨在探索新的内感干预策略(例如，基于这里研究的两种方法)，以预防、检测或治疗精神疾病，解决身体疾病的心理影响，并促进日常生活中的健康行为。 与公共健康相关：这个项目将开始了解个人从身体感知感觉的能力如何影响他们对这些感觉的心理反应。心理反应是正常感知、判断和决策的中心，在躯体形式障碍、抑郁、焦虑和成瘾等精神疾病以及糖尿病等涉及神经病变的身体疾病中会发生变化。因此，这些知识可以帮助指导未来的预防、诊断和治疗研究。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Are you hungry? Tired? Sad? These experiences all rely on "interoceptive" sensations sent from the body to the brain. Interoceptive sensations can be experienced as a homeostatic requirement of the body (e.g., need for food, drink, rest), or as an affective state characterized as feelings of pleasure-displeasure and with some degree of arousal. In turn, affect seamlessly integrates into normal perception and decision-making. Moreover, because sources of affect go unrecognized everyday life, it is easy to misattribute affect to a spurious source, which can lead to unhealthy behavioral patterns (e.g., discomfort from an argument at work can be mistaken as discomfort of hunger, and can lead to overeating). Furthermore, in addition to being central to healthy mental life, interoception and affective processing are severely altered in many mental diseases such as somatoform disorders, depression, anxiety, and addiction, and in physical diseases involving neuropathy such as diabetes. Although facets of interoception and affective processing have been correlated, there is a critical lack of knowledge regarding causality in these relationships. Here, this barrier is addressed experimentally by using two training approaches to enhance interoceptive sensitivity in healthy young adults, and by comparing pre- and post-training measurements of three facets of affective processing: (i) affective judgment of evocative images, (ii) physiological reactivity in response to evocative images, and (iii) the extent to whic affective feelings are misattributed during person perception. To enhance interoceptive sensitivity, Study 1 uses traditional heartbeat detection training, whereas Study 2 uses a novel approach, real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging neurofeedback, to enhance brain activity in the right anterior insula, which is involved in interoception. In both studies, interoceptive sensitivity will be assessed pre- and post-training using a heartbeat detection task. Furthermore, to tailor interoceptive sensitivity training to the needs of each individual, Study 1 explores two sets of training instructions that may modulate whether an individual experiences interoceptive sensations as either (a) "emotional feelings" or (b) "physical sensations" (e.g., an individual with somatoform disorder has an unhealthy bias in experiencing "physical sensations" and hence would benefit from "emotional feeling" training). Accomplishing these aims will inform future research designed to explore novel interoception-intervention strategies (e.g., based on the two approaches studied here) to prevent, detect, or treat mental illness, to address psychological effects of physical illness, and to promote healthy behaviors in everyday life. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This project will begin to understand how an individual's ability to detect sensations from their body influences their mental reactions to those sensations. The mental reactions are central to normal perception, judgment, and decision making, and are altered in mental diseases such as somatoform disorders, depression, anxiety, and addiction, and in physical diseases involving neuropathy such as diabetes. Hence, this knowledge can help direct future research for prevention, diagnosis, and treatment.