Associated organisationsBrighton and Sussex Medical School · University College London · University of Bristol · University of Cambridge · University of SussexEurope PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding£4.4M
PeriodMar 2024 — Mar 2031
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
The flutter in your chest before a difficult conversation, the knot in your stomach when you’re anxious—these internal body signals are the focus of a new international study aiming to improve treatment for depression and anxiety. Current therapies for these conditions target emotional skills like recognising feelings, labelling them precisely, and regulating them. But these skills all depend on interoception—how the brain senses and interprets the body’s internal state. This project will systematically test whether improving interoception can strengthen those emotional skills and, in turn, boost treatment outcomes. The researchers will first develop a standardised battery of tests to measure interoception in individuals, linking specific disruptions to symptoms of depression and anxiety. They will then experimentally manipulate interoception to prove it causally improves emotional skills. Finally, they will reverse-engineer an established treatment—mindfulness training—to see whether its benefits arise from enhancing interoceptive mechanisms. Experiments will run across the UK and Argentina, with lived-experience experts involved from start to finish. If successful, this fundamental science could identify which patients would benefit from interoception-focused therapies and lead to targeted “boosters” that sharpen internal body awareness, making existing treatments more effective for millions of people.
View original technical description
The sense you have of the internal state of your body—interoception—is key to detecting, interpreting, and regulating emotion. Interoception is a common mechanism underlying emotion-based active ingredients targeted in the treatment of anxiety and depression: affective awareness, emotional granularity, emotional controllability, and emotion regulation. We propose a three-stage approach to assess, augment, and clinically track interoceptive mechanisms of emotion in mental health treatments. In WP1, we will establish a comprehensive battery of interoceptive assessments and determine their links with emotion-based active ingredients, depression and anxiety, allowing us to characterise dimensions and disruptions of interoceptive signaling on an individual basis. In WP2 we will demonstrate causality, showing how targeted modulation of interoception across different hierarchical levels improves emotion-based active ingredients. In WP3, we will use reverse-translation to link efficacy of an established treatment, mindfulness training, to enhancements in emotion-based active ingredients and their interoceptive mechanisms. Experiments will take place across the UK and Argentina, fully integrating lived experience expertise from conceptualization to dissemination. Uncovering the interoceptive mechanisms of emotion-based active ingredients could transform treatment options, helping identify who might benefit from interoceptive targeting, and leading to the development of interoceptive ‘boosters’ to improve treatment outcome for depression and anxiety
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