Abstract
In their paper Suksasilp and Garfinkel (2022) outline the most comprehensive model of interoception to date. The authors expertly articulate the structure of interoception and their model incorporates multiple important facets.
Despite many strengths, this model does not yet incorporate propensity to use interoceptive signals. Individuals differ in the degree to which they utilise interoceptive signals for gauging internal states and for higher-order cognitive processes. One example of this comes from gender differences in interoception; whilst men outperform women on lab-based tasks of interoceptive accuracy, no differences are observed in naturalistic environments where external cues are available for compensation (Cox et al., 1985, Pennebaker and Watson, 1988). Gender differences in the relationship between interoceptive accuracy and emotional processing are also reported, with evidence that emotional processing more strongly relates to interoception in men (Pennebaker and Roberts, 1992, Lischke et al., 2020). Given theoretical and empirical links between interoception emotion (Critchley & Garfinkel, 2017), these results are surprising as women generally outperform men on tests of emotion (Thompson & Voyer, 2014). Taken together, I propose that these results suggest that individuals differ in 1) their general interoceptive propensity (the use of internal vs. external cues for gauging internal states); 2) how much they rely upon interoceptive signals for different processes, such as emotional processing or decision making and; 3) the extent to which using interoceptive cues is adaptive.