Interoception
The sense of the body's internal state that feelings are built on.
What it means
Interoception is the perception of the internal physiological condition of the body, including signals such as heartbeat, breathing, hunger, temperature, and visceral tension, integrated by the brain into a sense of how one feels inside. It is widely regarded as a foundation of emotional experience, since theories from James-Lange to constructed emotion treat felt emotion as partly an interpretation of bodily signals. Interoceptive accuracy is often measured with heartbeat-detection tasks, and individual differences in it relate to emotional intensity, decision making, and the somatic-marker account of intuition. Atypical interoception is implicated in anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and alexithymia, where bodily signals are misread or poorly integrated. It is a rapidly growing bridge between neuroscience and the psychology of emotion.
Examples
Noticing your own quickening heartbeat and tight chest, then interpreting them as anxiety, depends on interoceptive sensing of the body.
You snap at a colleague at three in the afternoon and only later realise you have not eaten since breakfast — the bodily signal was there, misread as irritation with them.
A negotiator notices her stomach tightening just before she says yes, treats the sensation as information rather than noise, and asks for a night to think it over.
First described in Term: Sherrington (1906); modern affective work by A. D. Craig and Bud Craig (2002).