On the role of interoception and alexithymia for embodied health

Abstract

The aim of the symposium is twofold: First, the role of bodily signals and their perception (interoception) is introduced as a concept closely related to aspects of alexithymia, a personality trait mainly characterized by difficulties in describing and identifying feelings and by an externally oriented thinking style. While alexithymia is used for many years in clinical research, its relevance for health psychology as an important trait variable is quite new. The increasing realization of the extent to which mental processes are embodied has put interoceptive processes and the close interplay between the mind and the physiological state in the focus. Second, embodied health with the body as main stage of emotions or stress will be linked to both interoceptive processes as well as alexithymic trait that can act as resources or risk factors for many health-related issues. The rationale of the symposium is to present better insight on these two related topics in order to allow connections being relevant when our mind and well-being is understood as embodied. This knowledge can be used in various ways being strongly associated with core topics of health psychology such as health-related interventions, emotional processing or coping with stress. A special focus will lie on innovative methods allowing various insights in new ways to quantify interoceptive processes and aspects of alexithymia. Therefore, the symposium will introduce research highlighting how alexithymia interacts with the identification of emotional faces or is associated with poor emotion regulation explaining internalizing problems. Linking alexithymia with interoception and body ownership, the body and the perception of the body using bodily signals both from the cardiovascular as well as from the gastrointestinal system will be presented, using healthy persons and patients suffering from eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge eating.