(PS6-C69) The Relationship Between Interoception and Emotional Reactivity: Evidence from a Negative Mood Induction Procedure

Interoception is a multidimensional construct referring to perception of internal bodily signals, such as heartbeats (Khalsa et al., 2018). Two of the most widely studied dimensions are interoceptive accuracy (i.e., the ability to precisely detect internal body sensations) and interoceptive sensibility (i.e., the self-reported tendency to focus on internal bodily states in daily life, including beliefs, attitudes, and feelings about interoceptive signals). Interoception has been conceptualized as a core component of the emotional experience (James, 1884), including emotion identification (Brewer, 2016) and emotion regulation (Füstös et al., 2013). This study aims to explore the relationship between interoception and emotional reactivity, operationalized as the change in self-reported mood and the heart rate variability, a physiological marker of the emotional state, in non-depressed individuals exposed to a  negative mood induction procedure Eighty participants (M_age = 44.73, SD_age = 15.96; 65% women) completed the Heartbeat Counting Task (Schandry, 1981) and the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness-2 (MAIA-2) (Mehling et al., 2018) at baseline. They also completed the Sadness and Joy dimensions of the Scale for Mood Assessment (Sanz, 2001) before and after being administered a negative mood induction procedure (Baños, 2006). This procedure included a 6-min combination of Velten’s tasks (Velten, 1968), International Affective Pictures (Lang et al., 1999), sad music, and a negative autobiographical memory (Eich & Metcalfe, 1989). Electrocardiogram data were collected using a Biopac MP160 system with surface 3-Lead electrodes and analyzed with iMotions software to compute the average deviation of the normal-to-normal intervals (SDDN) as a time-domain heart rate variability parameter. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that, after controlling for gender and age, the average SDDN during the negative mood induction procedure was negatively predicted by the self-reported ability to shift attention to bodily signals (i.e., Attention Regulation dimension of the MAIA-2) (B = -3.57, β = -.22, p = .023), accounting for 41.2% of the explained variance (F = 12.71, p < .001). However, no other interoceptive variables were significantly related to the heart rate variability or change in self-reported sadness or joy. These findings highlight the importance of interoceptive abilities in emotional reactivity and indicate that those with higher self-reported ability to focus on bodily sensations (regardless of their actual interoceptive accuracy) show lower heart rate variability during the induction, indicating a more negative emotional valence and higher dominance of the induced emotion at the physiological level (Choi et al., 2017). In other words, controlling one’s attention towards the body may help individuals to better connect with the physiological component of the emotion, which could be a precursor to better identifying and regulating target emotions. Although further studies should confirm these findings in clinical samples and ecological settings, this study supports the importance of treatments that target interoceptive sensibility to enhance the emotional experience.