The Affective Side of Interoception |
At every moment, there is something a person or animal is trying to do (a goal) and a reason they are trying to do it (a context for that goal). In the Affect Management Framework (AMF; Haynes-LaMotte, 2025), contextualized goals are constantly shifting in the brain, informed by the senses of the world and the body (vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell, interoception, and proprioception) as well as the semantic factors of meaningfulness, certainty, and agency.
Because our affect is attached to our goals, the contextualized goals we take on and how and when we choose to pursue or relinquish them across similar situations can be described as different affect management policies.
In this post, I hope to expand upon the affective side of the interoceptive senses as described in the AMF:
Interoception, or the brain’s sense of the internal milieu of the body, is one way that the brain’s goals are evaluated. For example, when stepping on a LEGO by accident, it is the interoceptive pain signals and when they stop that tell a person when they have satisfied the relevant goal. Several actions humans perform every day are evaluated interoceptively (e.g., eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom, turning the thermostat up or down).
As pointed out by Velasco and Loev (2021), interoceptive senses are not always strictly evaluative (e.g., the feeling of air filling your lungs is neutral), but they become evaluative to the extent they might prompt a person to act (i.e., by creating a goal; Köteles, 2021).
Nearly all of the interoceptive sensations travel through a shared homeostatic afferent pathway to the brain’s insula, where they are represented in conscious experience (Craig, 2015). Also included in this pathway is “affective touch,” mediated by slow-conducting nerve fibers dispersed throughout the skin called C-tactile afferents (Crucianelli, Enmalm, & Ehrsson, 2022).
Interestingly, the common cold is believed to impact affect via the humoral pathway to the brain, where cytokines from the immune system and hormones make it into the brain via blood and cerebrospinal fluid (Dantzer, Konsman, Bluthé, Kelley, 2000; Savitz & Harrison, 2018). Ceunen, Vlaeyen, and Van Diest (2016) point out that, from these kinds of examples, “it should be clear that really any type of sensory information, and not merely that from homeostatic pathways, can get integrated into the overall body percept” (p. 12).
Compared to the purely exteroceptive senses (i.e., vision and audition), there are a few idiosyncrasies about the ways in which interoception operates: First, interoceptive accuracy for most people tends to be quite poor (Ferentzi, Drew, Tihanyi, & Köteles, 2018; Köteles, 2024), and accuracy for one type of body sensation is not generalizable to accuracy for others (Ferentzi, Bogdány et al., 2018). This also coincides with the finding that primates (including humans) are the only animals with physiology that allows a spatially distinct mapping of the viscera to enter conscious........