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BackgroundEmotions play a central role in mental disorder and especially in depression. They are sensed in the body, and it has recently been shown in healthy participants that these sensations can be differentiated between emotions. The aim of the current study was to assess bodily sensations for basic emotions induced by emotion eliciting pictures in depression.Methods30 healthy controls (HC), 30 individuals suffering from Major depressive disorder (MDD) without medication use (MDDnm) and 30 individuals with MDD with medication use (MDDm) were shown emotional and neutral pictures and were asked to paint areas in an empty body silhouette where they felt an increase or decrease in activation. Body sensation maps were then calculated and statistical pattern recognition applied.ResultsResults indicated statistically separable activation patterns for all three groups. MDDnm showed less overall activation than HCs, especially in sadness and fear, while MDDm showed stronger deactivation for all emotions than the other two groups.ConclusionsWe could show that emotion experience was associated with bodily sensations that are weaker in depression than in healthy controls and that antidepressant medication was correlated with an increased feeling of bodily deactivation. Results give insights into the relevance for clinicians to acknowledge bodily sensations in the treatment of depression.

This study examined whether individuals with social anxiety disorder have a memory bias for bodily sensations associated with anxiety. Using a false feedback paradigm, 33 individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD) and 34 non-anxious control (NAC) participants completed a performance task while monitoring stimuli they were told provided feedback on whether their physiological response was changing or stable. On measures of free recall and recognition for their feedback no differences were found between SAD and NAC individuals. However, among SAD participants only, fear of bodily sensations was significantly associated with enhanced memory for stimuli associated with physiological responses. Results suggest that research and treatment may benefit from considering not only fear of social situations, but also the focus of those fears, such as bodily sensations, when examining memory biases in social anxiety.

Background The predictive turn in Alzheimer's disease dementia (ADD) is marked by increasing research and use of biomarkers to determine individual ADD risk. It may even become available for the general population. Undergoing predictive testing and learning about the individual ADD risk is ethically relevant e.g., for (mental) well‐being and self‐perception and poses new challenges for clinical practice. The qualitative part of the PreTAD‐project (Predictive Turn in Alzheimer's Disease: Ethical, Clinical, Linguistic, Legal Aspects) analyzes these ethical aspects to derive meaningful implications for handling ADD risk estimation in cognitively unimpaired individuals. Method In our qualitative study, individuals a) who had no prior experience with ADD, b) with first‐degree relatives with ADD, and c) with subjective cognitive decline created body maps alongside narrative interviews. Body mapping is a qualitative visual method by which we aimed to capture the embodied experience of hypothetically learning about (a, b) or a subjectively perceived (c) ADD risk. The body maps and interviews were systematically analyzed and triangulated. Result In total, N = 28 participants created body maps (a, n = 8; b, n = 10; c, n = 10). The body maps provided deep, multifaceted insights into the embodiment of ADD risk. The focus on bodily sensations acted as a direct trigger for most participants to subjectively engage in a (hypothetical) scenario of being confronted with ADD risk. Participants experienced ADD risk as both a cognitive and bodily phenomenon, individually localized in different regions of their bodies (e.g., the heart). Common sensations were related to fear and anxiety or immediately perceived symptoms of cognitive decline, but also hope and urge to act, indicating a reflexive process of various sensations associated with ADD risk. Participants frequently used metaphors, e.g., describing heaviness (“a thousand tons”), to articulate their bodily sensations. Conclusion The body maps alongside the participants’ narrations provided a multifaceted understanding of how bodily sensations, self‐perception, and mental state are interwoven and can be influenced when individuals are confronted with ADD risk. The findings highlight the connection between bodily, cognitive and emotional experiences, which is relevant for person‐sensitive risk communication. Body maps can inform ethical guidance for handling ADD risk estimation in clinical practice.

This paper is the first overview of the treatment of haptic knowledges in geography, responding to bodily sensations and responses that arise through the embodied researcher. After Crang’s (2003) article on ‘touchy-feely’ methods identifies the dearth of actual touching and embodied feeling in research methods, this article does three things. First, it clarifies the terminology, which is derived from a number of disciplines. Second, it summarizes developments in sensuous ethnographies within cultural geography and anthropology. Third, it suggests pathways to new research on ‘sensuous dispositions’ and non-representational theory. We thereby see just how ‘touchy-feely’ qualitative methods have, or might, become.

We explored the role of negative performance beliefs and self-focused attention considered central to psychological models of social anxiety but not studied in autism. Firstly, we compared self- and observer ratings of performance on a social task for 71 young autistic people, 41 high and 30 low in social anxiety, finding a significant main effect of social anxiety but not rater. Subsequently, 76 autistic young people, 46 high and 30 low social anxiety completed measures of interoceptive sensibility and focus of attention following a social task. Only heightened interoceptive sensibility fully mediated the relationship between self-ratings of social performance and social anxiety. These findings suggest awareness of bodily sensations are critical to anxiety in social situations with implications for treatment.

People form coherent representations of goal-directed actions. Such agency experiences of intentional action are reflected by a shift in temporal perception: self-generated motor movements and subsequent sensory effects are perceived to occur closer together in time—a phenomenon termed intentional binding. Building on recent research suggesting that temporal binding occurs without intentionally performing actions, we further examined whether such perceptual compression occurs when motor action is fully absent. In three experiments, we used a novel sensory-based adaptation of the Libet clock paradigm to assess how a brief tactile sensation on the index finger and a resulting auditory stimulus perceptually bind together in time. Findings revealed robust temporal repulsion (instead of binding) between tactile sensation and auditory effect. Temporal repulsion was attenuated when participants could anticipate the identity and temporal onset (two crucial components of intentional action) of the tactile sensation. These findings are briefly discussed in the context of differences between intentional movement and anticipated bodily sensations in shaping action coherence and agentic experiences.

Purpose Interoceptive awareness refers to how one perceives its internal bodily sensations, and it has been associated with the ability to recognize, describe and regulate emotions. Physical activity (PA) has been demonstrated to have tremendous benefits for emotional well-being, but few studies have investigated how PA could moderate interoceptive awareness abilities. In this contribution, we first analysed the association between PA and interoceptive awareness. Then, we tested whether PA could functions as a moderator factor for emotional-bodily awareness relationship. Method 344 young adults were divided in three experimental groups according to their PA level (sedentary= 60; active= 114; highly active=170), assessed through the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ). The Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA), and the Toronto Alexythimia Scale (TAS-20) were also administered, to analyse participants’ interoceptive and emotional awareness. Data were analysed through generalized linear model (GLM) (to test PA association with interoceptive awareness), and moderation analysis (to test if PA could moderate bodily-emotional awareness relationship). Results GLM outputs showed that MAIA’s interoceptive awareness dimensions were successfully predicted by PA level, specifically Noticing, Not-distracting, Attention-regulation, Emotional awareness, and Self-regulation. Moreover, moderation analysis results showed that PA acted as moderating factor between interoceptive and emotional awareness (). Conclusions Despite its preliminary nature, our contribution represents one of the first attempts to operationalize the relationship between Interoceptive and emotional awareness through the inclusion of PA, suggesting the use of practices based on emotional and body awareness to promote psychological and physical well-being as well as successes in sport.

The research studies on pain sensation and on medically unnecessary genital cutting have developed largely independently over the past few decades.1 However, in recent years, both of them have shifted from a predominately physical focus (in the case of pain, looking for purely “organic” etiologies of aversive bodily sensations; in the case of genital cutting, attributing putative harms primarily to the physiological consequences of the cutting itself) to one that integrates biological, psychological, and wider social factors in understanding the phenomena in question—and their diverse effects on lived experience (Bossio & Pukall, 2018; Craig, 2018; Einstein, 2008; Jacobson et al., 2018; Karos, Williams, Meulders, & Vlaeyen, 2018). With respect to pain, such biopsychosocial models have happily become more dominant in the field (e.g., see Turk & Monarch, 2018), but have so far been applied only to certain domains. The Target Article by Connor, Brady, Chaisson, Sharif Mohamed, and Robinson (2019), which further develops and extends the purview of such models to sexual pain related to female genital cutting (FGC), makes for a valuable contribution

Preclinical findings suggest that transcranial infrared laser stimulation (TILS) improves fear extinction learning and cognitive function by enhancing prefrontal cortex (PFC) oxygen metabolism. These findings prompted our investigation of treating pathological fear using this non-invasive stimulation approach either alone to the dorsolateral PFC (dlPFC), or to the ventromedial PFC (vmPFC) in combination with exposure therapy. Volunteers with pathological fear of either enclosed spaces, contamination, public speaking, or anxiety-related bodily sensations were recruited for this randomized, single-blind, sham-controlled trial with four arms: (a) Exposure + TILS_vmPFC ( = 29), (b) Exposure + sham TILS_vmPFC ( = 29), (c) TILS_dlPFC alone ( = 26), or (d) Sham TILS _dlPFC alone ( = 28). Post-treatment assessments occurred immediately following treatment. Follow-up assessments occurred 2 weeks after treatment. A total of 112 participants were randomized [age range: 18-63 years; 96 females (85.71%)]. Significant interactions of Group × Time and Group × Context indicated differential treatment effects on retention (i.e. between time-points, averaged across contexts) and on generalization (i.e. between contexts, averaged across time-points), respectively. Among the monotherapies, TILS_dlPFC outperformed SHAM_dlPFC in the initial context, = -13.44, 95% CI (-25.73 to -1.15), = 0.03. Among the combined treatments, differences between EX + TILS_vmPFC and EX + SHAM_vmPFC were non-significant across all contrasts. TILS to the dlPFC, one of the PFC regions implicated in emotion regulation, resulted in a context-specific benefit as a monotherapy for reducing fear. Contrary to prediction, TILS to the vmPFC, a region implicated in fear extinction memory consolidation, did not enhance exposure therapy outcome.

The articles in this special issue show how a theoretical approach informed bythe mobilities turn can reveal new facets of the history of dangerous mobility.This afterword draws together some of these lessons concerning materialities,bodily sensations, and performativity, and then considers how we might studythese aspects of danger and mobility from an international, comparative, andhistorical methodological perspective.