Know Yourself: Effects of Interoception and Emotion Conceptualization on Anxiety (2016)

Undergraduates: Jared Scruggs, Holly Shablack

Faculty Advisor: Kristen Lindquist
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

---

Anxiety is a major cause of distress for many Americans. Much could be gained from understanding the fundamental processes that cause this maladaptive experience. According to a psychological constructionist perspective, anxiety may arise when people perceive and make meaning of their internal physical sensations as an instance of threat. As part of a separate experiment involving stress induction, we collected self-report data intended to measure interoceptive sensibility, or subjective perception of interoception, emotion conceptualization and differentiation, and anxiety. We also subjected participants to the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) in order to induce higher physiological arousal and state anxiety. I hypothesized that interoceptive sensibility and emotion differentiation would serve as a buffer against anxiety resulting from the TSST, such that a negative relationship would emerge between the individual variables of interoceptive sensibility and emotion conceptualization and the outcome variable, anxiety. I argued, however, that after a certain point this relationship would shift to positive, demonstrating a curvilinear relationship between modes of self-awareness and anxiety.