Interoception: The Eighth Sensory System: Practical Solutions for Improving Self-Regulation, Self-Awareness and Social Understanding of Individuals with Autism Spectrum and Related Disorders

The Feeling of Me Feeling for You: Interoception, Alexithymia and Empathy in Autism

“…Hill et al, 2004), there may be large subset of individuals with ASD whose experience of emotions (their own and those of others) is qualitatively different from other individuals with ASD. Furthermore, our results suggest that these individuals may have reduced access to associative learning mechanisms between interoceptive signals, their emotions, and others' emotions (Bird & Viding, 2014;Murphy, Brewer, Catmur & Bird, 2017;Quatrocki & Friston, 2014), which means interoceptive training to accompany social and/or emotional learning for these individuals could be helpful (Livingston & Livingston, 201;Shah, 2016). This may be a valuable insight for anyone who deals with people with ASD, from parents to teachers to therapists, and is a topic that clearly warrants further research.…”

Individuals with Autistic Traits Exhibit Heightened Alexithymia But Intact Interoceptive-Exteroceptive Sensory Integration

“…Empirical evidence suggest that interoceptive accuracy (i.e., the extent to which an individual can accurately detect interoceptive signals) is associated with memory and learning (Chua & Bliss-Moreau, 2016;Garfinkel et al, 2013;Umeda et al, 2016), emotion regulation (Fuestoes et al, 2013;Schaan et al, 2019), empathy (Fukushima et al, 2011;Mul et al, 2018), self-awareness (Seth, 2013;Seth & Tsakiris, 2018;Shah, 2016) and decision making (Dunn et al, 2010;Soosalu et al, 2019). Importantly, accurate detection and integration of internal bodily signals is believed to be fundamental to homeostasis (Berntson et al, 1993;Tsakiris & Critchley, 2016), and could facilitate the interaction between one's embodied self and the external environment (Quattrocki & Friston, 2014).…”