Bodily maps of emotion in psychiatry: A preregistered systematic review.

The ability to efficiently identify, respond to and regulate emotions is impaired in a large range of psychiatric disorders. Interoception, the ability to perceive, integrate and interpret internal bodily signals, contributes to emotions as it is responsible for the emergence of the subjective bodily sensations involved in affective states. Bodily maps of emotions allow visualizing where individuals feel bodily changes during discrete emotions, offering a direct window onto the interoceptive phenomenology of emotional experience. This paradigm thus also provides a direct way to observe the involvement of interoception in emotional disturbances, a transdiagnostic process of most psychiatric states. However, although the role of bodily sensations in emotional processing has been examined in certain psychiatric conditions, it has not yet been integrated into a broader transdiagnostic framework.Following PRISMA guidelines, this systematic review synthesizes research using bodily maps to assess interoceptive emotional experiences in psychiatric populations. We identified altered interoceptive experiences related to emotions and highlighted underexplored areas in this field.We found altered interoceptive experiences of emotions are common across a large range of psychiatric states, including depression, schizophrenia, autism, and alcohol use disorder. Despite these broad disruptions, studies failed to establish the mechanisms by which interoceptive experiences may contribute to difficulties in different emotional processes (i.e., identification, response, and regulation). We hence propose new directions for the use of bodily maps to foster a more theoretically grounded and comprehensive analysis of interoceptive experiences in psychiatry.