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Description
Interoception, the perception of the body’s physiological condition, underlies fundamental emotional and cognitive processes. However, how the conscious representation of bodily signals influences the understanding of others' minds remains unclear. This study aims to investigate whether individual differences in the interoceptive processing, in terms of interoceptive accuracy (IAcc), sensibility (ISe), and awareness (IAw), shape core processes underlying social cognition (i.e., empathy and Theory of Mind, ToM) across the lifespan.
The study involved 189 healthy individuals grouped by age: 32 children (7-10 yrs), 55 adolescents (12-14 yrs), and 100 adults (18-55 yrs). They completed tasks probing affective/cognitive ToM and empathy, IAcc (heartbeat tracking task), IAw (accuracy-confidence correlation), and an ISe questionnaire.
IAcc negatively correlated with affective ToM in adults and cognitive empathy in adolescents, possibly because enhanced abilities in perceiving the inner body result in stronger boundaries between themselves and others from adolescence onwards. IAw was negatively associated with empathy only in children, highlighting developmental differences in metacognitive awareness of bodily signals. Conversely, ISe consistently showed a positive correlation with empathy across all age groups, indicating a stable trait-like representation.
These findings support embodied and multifaceted models of social cognition, suggesting specific connections between social cognition and interoceptive dimensions at different life stages. Moreover, they are consistent with evidence suggesting the discrepancy between interoceptive dimensions.
Given the presence of social cognition and interoceptive difficulties in disorders like autism and schizophrenia, these insights could also prove valuable for clinical applications, such as creating personalized interventions for different stages of life.
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