TY - JOUR
T1 - Paradoxical somatic information processing for interoception and anxiety in alexithymia
AU - Terasawa, Yuri
AU - Oba, Kentaro
AU - Motomura, Yuki
AU - Katsunuma, Ruri
AU - Murakami, Hiroki
AU - Moriguchi, Yoshiya
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by Grant‐in‐Aid for JSPS Research Fellows (No. 12J10119) and Grant‐in‐Aid for Scientific Research (A) (No. 20H00108) awarded to Y.T. from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors. European Journal of Neuroscience published by Federation of European Neuroscience Societies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
PY - 2021/12
Y1 - 2021/12
N2 - The concept of alexithymia has garnered much attention in an attempt to understand the psychological mechanisms underlying the experience of feeling an emotion. In this study, we aimed to understand how the interoceptive processing in an emotional context relates to problems of alexithymia in recognizing self-emotions. Therefore, we prepared experimental conditions to induce emotional awareness based on interoceptive information. As such, we asked participants to be aware of interoception under an anxiety-generating situation anticipating pain, having them evaluate their subjective anxiety levels in this context. High alexithymia participants showed attenuated functional connectivity within their ‘interoception network’, particularly between the insula and the somatosensory areas when they focused on interoception. In contrast, they had enhanced functional connectivity between these regions when they focused on their anxiety about pain. Although access to somatic information is supposed to be more strongly activated while attending to interoception in the context of primary sensory processing, high alexithymia individuals were biased as this process was activated when they felt emotions, suggesting they recognize primitive and unprocessed bodily sensations as emotions. The paradoxical somatic information processing may reflect their brain function pathology for feeling emotions and their difficulty with context-dependent emotional control.
AB - The concept of alexithymia has garnered much attention in an attempt to understand the psychological mechanisms underlying the experience of feeling an emotion. In this study, we aimed to understand how the interoceptive processing in an emotional context relates to problems of alexithymia in recognizing self-emotions. Therefore, we prepared experimental conditions to induce emotional awareness based on interoceptive information. As such, we asked participants to be aware of interoception under an anxiety-generating situation anticipating pain, having them evaluate their subjective anxiety levels in this context. High alexithymia participants showed attenuated functional connectivity within their ‘interoception network’, particularly between the insula and the somatosensory areas when they focused on interoception. In contrast, they had enhanced functional connectivity between these regions when they focused on their anxiety about pain. Although access to somatic information is supposed to be more strongly activated while attending to interoception in the context of primary sensory processing, high alexithymia individuals were biased as this process was activated when they felt emotions, suggesting they recognize primitive and unprocessed bodily sensations as emotions. The paradoxical somatic information processing may reflect their brain function pathology for feeling emotions and their difficulty with context-dependent emotional control.
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U2 - 10.1111/ejn.15528
DO - 10.1111/ejn.15528
M3 - Article
C2 - 34766398
AN - SCOPUS:85120638618
VL - 54
SP - 8052
EP - 8068
JO - European Journal of Neuroscience
JF - European Journal of Neuroscience
SN - 0953-816X
IS - 11
ER -