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Emotions are often accompanied by bodily changes. We experience this when we blush with embarrassment, feel our heart beat faster, and our breath go shallow when we are in fear. The view that emotion and body are intimately related was first formulated by William James (James, 1884) who claimed that peripheral autonomic changes constitute emotions. The sensing of autonomic changes is referred to as interoception, the afferent processing of signals that originate within the body. Involved in interoception are different classes and channels (eg cardiovascular, gastric) of information that are distinct with respect to their afferent pathway (neural, humoral) and the generation of the signal (mechanoreceptive organ stretching, chemoreception). These channels share neural substrates, that is, brain mechanisms, in which integrative processes take place. These allow for the generation of representations that predict internal states, which might steer adaptive behavior (eg when blood sugar levels drop below a specific threshold, find food). Changes in bodily states and their interoceptive signalling can be constitutive of emotional feelings, leading to the possibility that the affective style (eg the intensity of emotions) of a person reflects differences in conscious and unconscious processing of interoceptive information.

Individual interoceptive differences manifest themselves in different psychological dimensions of interoception that comprise objective, subjective, and metacognitive measures (Canales-Johnson et al., 2015; Garfinkel et al., 2015). Quantifications of interoceptive abilities include objective measures such as behavioral performance …