Interoception
Interoception is our sixth sense - the sensations and signals we get from inside our body. This includes sensations that come from your cardiac, respiratory, and gastrointestinal systems. For example, feeling your heart race, shortness of breath, and hunger contractions. (Altered) interoception has been implicated in a number of mental health conditions, including eating disorders - but most research tends to focus on domains with readily-measured signals (such as cardiac interoception) or interoception across domains.
Given the intuitive links between hunger, fullness, and other gastric sensations and eating disorders, Lucy is especially interested in gastrointestinal interoception, and whether these sensations interact with how people feel about and perceive their bodily appearance.
Her preliminary research suggests that how people with eating disorders feel about gastrointestinal signals is important for their eating behaviours. For example, feeling bloated and in turn guilty, disgusting, or worthless could encourage behaviours like excessive exercising, purging, or restriction to alleviate the bloating and in turn the negative emotions. This makes disordered eating practices highly reinforcing and encourages avoidance of aversive interoceptive experiences, such as the typical sensations of fullness we encounter after eating.
Her research also suggests that how people feel about gastrointestinal signals can also alter their exteroceptive representation of their body, especially how dissatisfied they feel with their bodily appearance. For example, people may dislike their bodily appearance more when feeling guilty because of fullness. They may then engage with disordered eating practices to change how they feel about their body. If these practices make them dislike their body less, this again makes disordered eating highly reinforcing.
Considering both the interoceptive and exteroceptive mechanisms involved in disordered eating, and how the two may interact, can help us understand how treatment can be improved. Interoceptive exposure therapy focuses on getting people with eating disorders to tolerate aversive sensations without engaging in disordered practices. However, Lucy’s research could suggest that more focus needs to be placed on how to tolerate the emotions and body image concerns produced by such sensations.
Lucy’s research to date has been on developing and validating a questionnaire to assess emotional responses to gastrointestinal sensations, aptly called the Negative Affect caused by Gastric Sensations scale, or NAGS. She is also now collecting experimental data investigating if changes in the NAGS can alter body image. Lucy is planning to continue her research on interoception and its implications for eating disorders after her PhD.