Running head: BODY SIGNAL BELIEFS Misleading sensations? How body signal beliefs interact with sympathetic reactivity and interoceptive ability to amplify affective stress By

Guided by the theory of constructed emotion, we developed a preliminary measure of interoceptive body signal beliefs and examined how such beliefs relate to trait interoceptive ability, sympathetic nervous system reactivity and affective stress during a stress induction task. During the first session of the study, we used a heartbeat detection task as a measure of interoceptive ability and collected self-reported data on participants’ bodily signal beliefs. In a follow-up session, we collected continuous measures of sympathetic response as participants completed the Trier Social Stress Test. Through hierarchical regression analyses, we found that sympathetic reactivity predicted both negative affect and somatic intensity during the stress induction task. Additionally, the interaction between negative beliefs about one’s bodily signals and interoceptive ability significantly predicted somatic intensity during stress. Moreover, we found a significant interaction between sympathetic reactivity and positive body signal beliefs in predicting negative affect, suggesting that positive body signal beliefs may buffer the relation between sympathetic reactivity and negative affect. These findings collectively suggest that the beliefs individuals have about the meaning of their bodily signals, in addition to sympathetic reactivity and interoceptive ability, can play a key role in amplifying affective stress. BODY SIGNAL BELIEFS 4 We easily notice the sting or a paper cut or the throbbing of a stubbed toe, but how do we interpret sensations arising from within the body? Interoception refers to the sense of the internal and physiological condition of the body, centrally generated and represented in the brain using peripheral feedback from visceral organs (Craig, 2003). Prior work reveals surprising variability in the extent to which individuals notice internal sensations. For example, some people find it difficult to notice or identify interoceptive sensations (e.g. as is the case in patients with major depressive disorder, who generally display lower accuracy on heartbeat counting tasks relative to healthy controls; Khalsa & Lapidus, 2016; Pollatos, Traunt-Mauch, & Schandry, 2009) while others appear hypervigilant to internal sensations (e.g. for example, patients with somatic symptom disorders tend to disproportionally report noxious internal sensations; Barsky 1992; Khalsa & Lapidus, 2016). Despite evident variation in people’s ability to notice their internal sensations, or interoceptive ability, relatively little is known about how healthy individuals evaluate and codify the bodily signals we experience on a daily basis, such as in emotions. Furthermore, only a small body of work within affective science investigates how individual variation in the ability to notice these bodily signals may shape instances of emotion. Drew Leder (1990) writes that our “interoceptive language,” or the words we use to describe sensations arising from within the body, is imprecise and spatially ambiguous (p.40). For instance, the pain of a heart attack may originate on the left side of the chest, but quickly travels down an arm or to the jaw. This lack of precision in interoceptive language may be due in part to the structure of the peripheral nervous system, which sends diffuse signals from visceral organs to the brain and radiates sensations to connected areas through phenomena such as referred pain (Leder, 1990, p. 41). Given the ambiguity of internal sensations, current psychological theories suggest that prior conceptual knowledge and beliefs about the emotions BODY SIGNAL BELIEFS 5 may play a critical role in helping individuals evaluate their internal signals (e.g Chanes & Barrett, 2017; MacCormack & Lindquist, 2017). Yet, little work examines the nature of beliefs about interoceptive bodily signals. Specifically, no known work to date examines the relation between interoceptive beliefs and emotion, nor examines how interoceptive beliefs may relate to individual differences in interoceptive ability and sympathetic nervous system reactivity. In the present study, we develop a preliminary measure of interoceptive body signal beliefs and examine how such beliefs relate to trait interoceptive ability (measured in a first session) and sympathetic nervous system reactivity and affective stress during a stress induction task (during a follow-up session). This study is inspired by psychological constructionist models of the mind, which state that emotions, along with all other mental events, emerge from more basic psychological processes (e.g., Lindquist, 2013). Here, we focus on two specific psychological processes: core affect and conceptual knowledge about interoceptive signals and emotion categories. Below, we review the theory of constructed emotion as a theoretical framework for studying variation in emotion. We then use the theory of constructed emotion to examine the nature of core affect, interoceptive ability, and interoceptive beliefs to generate relevant hypotheses for the interaction of these constructs as operationalized within this study. The Theory of Constructed Emotion (TCE) The idea that knowledge about bodily signals may influence variability in individual instances of emotion is consistent with psychological constructionist theories. Psychological constructionist theories propose that emotions arise from the combination of more basic psychological “components. ” These components are domain-general and not themselves specific to emotion (Russell, 2003; Gendron and Barrett, 2009; Barrett, 2006, Lindquist, 2013; Lindquist & Barrett, 2012). Prior neuroimaging meta-analyses (e.g. Korber et al., 2008; Lindquist, Satpute, BODY SIGNAL BELIEFS 6 Wager, Weber, & Barrett, 2015; Lindquist, Wager, Kober, Bliss-Moreau & Barrett, 2012; Oosterwijk et al., 2012) identify several intrinsic brain networks that activate across emotions and other psychological experiences, and which may help constitute the more basic psychological components predicted by the TCE. Key components identified include exteroceptive representations of stimuli outside the body (e.g. vision, audition, olfaction), somatosensory and interoceptive representations of stimuli within the body (in part, helping generate core affect— how pleasant or unpleasant, activated or deactivated one feels from moment to moment), and broader processes that stimulate, encode, and retrieve prior conceptual knowledge, such as language, memory, and attention. The TCE suggests that the brain actively draws on these components to predict and “construct” a given instance of emotion (Barrett & Lindquist, 2008; Lindquist, MacCormack, & Shablack, 2015). As noted above, the TCE hypothesizes that two psychological components, core affect and conceptual knowledge, play a particularly integral role in producing given instances of emotion (Barrett, 2006; 2017). These two components are described in more detail below. Core affect. Core affect is not only a key component in instances of emotion, but also in other psychological phenomenon such as verbal communication, decision-making, and stereotyping (Barrett & Bliss-Moreau, 2009; Russell, 2009). Core affect refers to central representations of the body’s ongoing allostatic state, including the incorporation of low-level processes involved in homeostatic maintenance (e.g. hunger, inflammation, and fatigue) as well as more specific visceral sensations generated by action on the autonomic nervous system (e.g., Bliss-Moreau & Barrett, 2009; MacCormack & Lindquist, 2017). In this process, the brain receives spinal lamina projections from the peripheral nervous system, encodes and refines representations of those peripheral sensations, and translates this BODY SIGNAL BELIEFS 7 peripheral feedback into centralized representations of “affect” or feelings of pleasure/displeasure (valence) and physiological activation/deactivation (arousal). Through this process, core affect serves as a heuristic or generalized representation of the body’s ongoing internal state (Lindquist, 2013; MacCormack & Lindquist, 2017), thus allowing the brain to monitor key physiological changes and update its predictions about how an organism needs to respond to an environmental challenge. Although core affect can directly represent bodily symptoms (e.g. a rapidly beating heart), in emotion and psychological literature, it generally refers to the subjective dimensions of valence and arousal. While the two dimensions vary independently of each other, we seldom experience valence without noticing the degree of arousal, and vice versa; thus, it is the combination of these dimensions that produces the unified component of component of core affect (Barrett & Russell, 1999). Although we experience emotion categories as unique and discrete, each discrete emotion does not form a distinctive corresponding dimension of core affect (Lindquist, 2013). Rather, core affect is considered “core” in part because the dimensions of valence and arousal underlie all discrete emotion (Barrett & Bliss-Moreau, 2009; Lindquist, 2013). In the present paper, there are two ways in which we operationalize core affect: (1) sympathetic reactivity— the “raw” signals or changes in the sympathetic nervous system from a neutral baseline— and (2) interoceptive ability— one’s ability to objectively detect changes in the body. Below we briefly describe each construct and its relation to core affect and instances of emotion. Sympathetic reactivity. Colloquially, the sympathetic nervous system is known as the “fight” or “flight” branch of the autonomic nervous system (ANS), preparing the body to BODY SIGNAL BELIEFS 8 respond to a perceived threat and change in a given situation through a series of stereotypical responses (e.g. elevated heart rate, pupillary dilation, constricted blood vessels, etc.). In emotion theory, classical approaches to emotion argue that emotion “families” (i.e. responses like aggression or anxiet