Momentary awareness of body sensations is associated with concurrent affective experience.

Abstract

Affect is thought to be a low-dimensional representation of ongoing body activity. Recent studies have demonstrated that individual differences in the ability to objectively detect one's body activity are related to affective experience, particularly the experience of affective arousal. However, less is known about the role of subjective awareness of body sensations in affective experience, a facet of interoception that has been distinguished from objective detection on theoretical and empirical grounds. Moreover, there is a lack of evidence concerning how affective experience relates to the perception of body activity in the moment; that is, how awareness of sensations from the body may covary with affective and emotional experiences in real time. In the present studies, we examine within-person relationships between subjective awareness of body sensations and self-reported affect in real-world settings using ecological momentary assessment (EMA) paradigms. Across two EMA studies with international samples of adults, we found participants reported greater awareness of body sensations in moments where they also reported experiencing heightened arousal and more negatively valenced affect. In Study 1 (N = 109; data collected and analyzed 2022), we found that the associations held across a 4-week EMA protocol. In Study 2 (N = 116; data collected 2020, analyzed 2022), we also derived measures of affective valence from participants' freely generated descriptions of their ongoing thoughts, and we explored the consistency of this relationship with awareness of several individual body sensations (e.g., awareness of one's breathing, awareness of one's heart rate). We conclude that affective experience covaries moment to moment with subjective awareness of the body. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).