The Role Of Interoceptive Awareness In Affect And Related Mental Faculties

描述（由申请人提供）：你饿吗？累了吗?悲伤?这些体验都依赖于从身体发送到大脑的“内感受”感觉。内感受可以被体验为身体的一种体内平衡需求（例如，对食物、饮料、休息的需要），或者作为一种情感状态，其特征是愉悦和不愉悦的感觉，并伴有某种程度的觉醒。反过来，情感无缝地整合到正常的感知和决策中。此外，由于日常生活中无法识别情感的来源，很容易将情感错误地归因于一个虚假的来源，这可能导致不健康的行为模式（例如，工作中争吵引起的不适可能被误认为是饥饿引起的不适，并可能导致暴饮暴食）。此外，除了对健康的精神生活至关重要外，内感受和情感处理在许多精神疾病（如躯体形式障碍、抑郁、焦虑和成瘾）和涉及神经病变的身体疾病（如糖尿病）中也受到严重改变。虽然内感受和情感处理的各个方面是相关的，但对这些关系中的因果关系的认识严重缺乏。在这里,

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.