Interoceptive Sensitivity, Emotional Empathy, and Alexithymia in Irritable Bowel Syndrome: A Research Protocol
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The brain and gut are deeply interconnected both anatomically and functionally. Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) is a chronic gastrointestinal disorder characterized by changes in bowel movements and chronic intestinal pain. Despite IBS being associated with increased interoceptive sensitivity and emotional distress, the relationship between IBS and empathy is not fully understood. This study aims to investigate whether individuals with IBS exhibit differences in emotional empathy and emotional processing compared to individuals without IBS, and whether heightened empathy exacerbates IBS symptoms through increased sensitivity to both internal gastrointestinal signals and external emotional cues. Participants will complete a behavioural empathy task involving emotionally salient film clips depicting social interactions. They will report their own emotional experiences and infer those of the characters, while physiological responses and eye tracking data are recorded. Self-report measures of empathy and interoceptive awareness will also be administered. Group differences and associations between empathy, interoceptive awareness, and symptom severity will be examined using appropriate statistical analyses.It is expected that individuals with IBS will demonstrate heightened emotional empathy and reactivity compared to controls, with stronger associations between interoceptive awareness and empathic distress.Predicted findings would support a bidirectional relationship between IBS and empathy, whereby IBS-related bodily sensitivity amplifies emotional attunement, and increased empathy worsens gastrointestinal symptoms. Conversely, a lack of association would suggest distinct processing mechanisms for empathy and direct emotional experience. This study seeks to advance an integrated model of IBS as a digestive disorder with significant affective and neurological dimensions. Results may inform future research on emotion-based intervention aimed at reducing both empathic distress and gastrointestinal symptoms, contributing to more holistic treatment approaches.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.041 | 0.013 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".