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Getting to the heart of the matter: Does aberrant interoceptive processing contribute towards emotional eating?
Young et. al (2017) designed two studies both on eating behavior and interoception since “at present it is unclear which aspects of interoception contribute to aberrant eating behaviour and obesity”. The first study used the novel interoceptive indices [interoceptive metacognitive awareness (IAw) and interoceptive prediction error (IPE)] and the traditional measures such as interoceptive accuracy (IAc) and interoceptive sensibility (IS), and examined their links with eating behavior and body mass index (BMI). The results confirmed the dissociation between these interoceptive indices: emotional eaters were characterised by a heightened interoceptive signal but reduced mega-cognitive awareness of their interoceptive abilities; and emotional eating was found to correlate with IPE but this effect could not be accounted for by differences in anxiety and depression. The second study verified the positive association between interoceptive accuracy and emotional eating using a new non-biased heartbeat discrimination task (based on the method of constant stimuli). The findings from study two included new and important mechanistic insights into the processes that may underlie problematic affect regulation in those overweight. [NPID: interoception, interoceptive awareness, obesity, metacognitive awareness, interoceptive prediction error, emotional eating, anxiety, depression, heartbeat discrimination task]
Year: 2018
