Quadratic Relationship Between Alexithymia and Interoceptive Accuracy, and Results From a Pilot Mindfulness Intervention
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alexithymia, or a reduced ability to label and describe one’s emotions, is a transdiagnostic construct associated with poor psychosocial outcomes. Currently, the mechanisms underlying affective deficits associated with alexithymia are unclear, hindering targeted treatment delivery. Recent research suggests deficient interoceptive awareness, or reduced awareness of one’s internal bodily state, may be key in the etiology of alexithymia. It has long been demonstrated that mindfulness meditation can alter perceptions of one’s own emotions and bodily cues. Therefore, it is possible that mindfulness meditation may reduce affective deficits associated with alexithymia by improving interoceptive awareness. In this study, we aimed to (1) elucidate the role of interoceptive awareness accuracy and sensibility, two dimensions of interoceptive awareness, in alexithymia, and (2) test the efficacy of brief mindfulness meditation for improving interoceptive accuracy, interoceptive sensibility and emotional awareness. 76 young adults completed a baseline heartbeat detection task, to assess interoceptive accuracy and sensibilityonve awareness, and the Toronto Alexithymia Scale – 20 item. They were randomly assigned to a brief mindfulness-based body scan meditation intervention or control condition. Afterwards, participants completed tasks assessing emotional awareness (i.e., affect labeling, emotional granularity) and follow-up heartbeat detection task. Relationships between alexithymia and interoceptive accuracy and sensibility were best described as quadratic (p = .002) and linear (p = .040), respectively. Participants in both conditions showed robust improvements in interoceptive accuracy from baseline to follow-up (p < .001; ηp2 = .15); however, there were no group (meditation or control) differences in degree of improvement. Similarly, there were no group differences in affect labeling or emotional granularity. These preliminary results suggest that heightened alexithymia may be associated with either relatively high or low interoceptive accuracy. The meditation condition did not result in improved interoceptive accuracy or sensibility above and beyond that of a control group. Improvements in interoceptive accuracy, interoceptive sensibility, and emotional awareness may require longer or more interaction intervention approaches. More research is needed to parse the potentially complex relationship between alexithymia and interoceptive awareness, and to develop targeted treatment approaches to ameliorating associated affective deficits.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".