Do you feel your body right now? Ecological momentary assessment of interoceptive intensity and valence across multiple domains in everyday life

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Researchers usually assess interoception (i.e., the perception of inner bodily states) under laboratory conditions, once, with a focus on one organ, mostly the heart. The present study expands this research and presents findings from two independent studies, demonstrating the reliability and validity of an ecological momentary assessment (EMA) approach to study interoception in different modalities at the very same time from a subjective perspective. We asked more than 250 participants to rate how intensely they feel their heart, gut, and breath at random moments in everyday life, as a measure of interoceptive attention. We further assessed the appraisal of these interoceptive body sensations by means of valence ratings. Across two samples (N1 = 141, N2 = 112), we demonstrated high reliability of this assessment at the between-person level and modest reliability at the within-person level. We further examined convergent and divergent validity for both subjective measures. The study findings highlight promising psychometric properties and applicability of this novel assessment of ambulatory interoception. This method enables large-scale field studies to investigate interoceptive attention and appraisal on a momentary basis to understand the role of bodily sensations in daily functioning and health.