Study Finds No Clear Link Between Body-Signal Sensing and Mental Health Symptoms

Researchers from Aarhus University and other institutes examined a question that has drawn growing attention in mental health research: whether people who are better or worse at sensing signals from inside their bodies also differ in their mental health symptoms.

This internal sensing is known as interoception. It can include noticing a heartbeat, changes in breathing, hunger, thirst, pain or body temperature. Earlier studies have sometimes linked interoception with mental health conditions, but results have not been consistent. The researchers noted that much earlier work relied on simple heartbeat-counting tasks, which have known measurement problems.

For this study, the team used tasks intended to connect actual bodily signals with participants’ perceptions and responses. They measured cardiac interoception, or awareness of heart-related signals, in 456 participants. They measured respiratory interoception, or awareness of breathing-related signals, in 245 participants.

The researchers did not look only at whether participants gave accurate answers. They also examined how precise their body-sensing judgments were and whether people’s confidence matched their performance. That match between confidence and performance is called metacognition.

Participants also provided information about their mental health symptoms at the time of the assessment. The report says these included depression, anxiety, ADHD and autism-spectrum traits. The researchers used several ways of analyzing the data, including correlation, Bayesian, categorical and network-based analyses.

Across those analyses, the researchers found no relationship between participants’ ability to sense heart or breathing signals and the mental health symptoms they reported. In this sample, body-signal sensing at rest did not predict those symptoms.

That result does not prove that interoception can never matter for mental health. It describes the relationships found in these participants using these measures at one point in time. The supplied news report does not provide the full paper’s demographic details, recruitment criteria, follow-up information or complete limitations.

The findings may help researchers be more careful about treating a single measure of body awareness as a broad sign of mental health risk. Further research would need to test other populations, situations and methods before drawing wider conclusions.