How do body awareness and tracking relate to emotional vulnerability?
Being emotionally vulnerable is linked to how we perceive and react to our internal bodily signals, but not to how accurately we can track our actual heart rate.
Source
Investigating the relationship between interoceptive accuracy, interoceptive awareness, and emotional susceptibility
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Survey of emotional susceptibility and MAIA body awareness; subset completed heartbeat tracking
- N
- N=321 · 135 women also completed the heartbeat perception task
- Population
- University students aged 19–27
- Outcome
- Links of interoceptive awareness/accuracy with emotional susceptibility
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How do body awareness and tracking relate to emotional vulnerability?
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321 participants
A total of 321 participants, aged between 19 and 27 years ( M = 20.53, SD = 0.88), were recruited for the study.
135 female participants
Of this sample, 135 female participants (mean age = 20.40 years, SD = 0.72) volunteered to perform the Heartbeat Perception Task (HPT).
What they did
Researchers recruited 321 university students to complete surveys measuring emotional susceptibility and their self-reported bodily awareness across eight dimensions. A subset of 135 female participants also completed a heartbeat tracking task to measure their objective physical accuracy. The researchers evaluated the links between these subjective attitudes, objective heart-rate tracking, and emotional sensitivity.
What they found
The study found that emotional susceptibility was not related to objective heartbeat tracking accuracy, but it was strongly linked to subjective aspects of body awareness. Specifically, people with higher emotional vulnerability tended to worry more about physical discomfort and reported stronger links between their emotions and body signals. In contrast, those who could regulate their attention and trust their physical bodies showed lower emotional vulnerability.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Because the data are entirely correlational, the study cannot prove whether specific patterns of bodily awareness cause emotional susceptibility or vice versa. The sample was highly skewed, with about 91% of the participants being female undergraduate psychology students, which limits how well these findings generalize to males or the broader population. Additionally, the heartbeat tracking task utilized different manual and digital methods across three groups, introducing potential inconsistency despite statistical tests showing no group differences.
Key terms
- interoceptive accuracy
- The objective ability to accurately detect and track internal physiological signals, such as heartbeats.
- interoceptive awareness
- A subjective, multidimensional self-report of how a person notices, appraises, and regulates their attention toward internal bodily sensations.
- emotional susceptibility
- A personality trait reflecting a person's tendency to feel vulnerable, helpless, or distressed when exposed to emotional situations.
- heartbeat perception task
- A laboratory test where participants estimate their heartbeats over specific time intervals to measure physical tracking accuracy.
- MAIA
- The Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness, a questionnaire designed to measure different psychological facets of body awareness.
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Common questions
Can I improve my emotional resilience by learning to count my heartbeat more accurately?
Probably not, as the study showed that objective physical accuracy (counting heartbeats) was not related to emotional susceptibility. Instead, psychological attitudes like trusting your body and not worrying about physical discomfort were the factors linked to lower emotional vulnerability.
What is the difference between interoceptive accuracy and awareness?
Accuracy is your objective performance on a physical test (like tracking your actual heart rate), while awareness is your subjective attitude, attention style, and emotional connection to your bodily signals.
Did the way heartbeats were measured affect the results?
The researchers used different methods to track heartbeats (chest electrodes, stethoscopes, and wrist pulses) and found no statistically significant difference in accuracy scores between the groups, suggesting the measurement method did not alter the findings.
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