Just got to read this. Very important! Been saying for years we need to stop measuring interoception at baseline, and yet in addiction most of the research in clinical pops is just that. It is challenging to go beyond baseline measures, but not doing that is a waste of precious resources!

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By the end of it we will have a better understanding of the role of interoception in addiction and how to target it in therapeutic processes. I probably spent more time than it is healthy or reasonable to get this grant, so happy to get it funded on my first try!

Throughout the project we will use state of the art measures of #interoception, and rely on a superb team of world-leading collaborators in both addiction and interoception. I will of course be hiring at PhD and Post-doc level pretty soon.

The clinical component will track physiology and bodily sensations associated with craving in clinical populations, and use this information to develop novel individualized treatments targeting bodily processes in a randomized controlled trial.

The experimental leg will measure whether bodily processes associated with craving drive intravenous alcohol self-administration and tobacco consumption in the laboratory and test whether this can predict escalation in substance use.

This LEAP program is very weird. Why do they call them performers first of all? 😅

Nice! Would you mind adding me?

Over time, these interoceptive changes become associated with alcohol expectancies, and could participate in risk for alcohol misuse and disorder. If your body responds more pleasantly to alcohol, or don't experience certain bodily sensations, you may be more likely to persevere.

Considering that this was isolated to interoceptive performance (and not extero), and that changes in interoception correlate with subjective alcohol effects, this points towards the idea that alcohol impacts bodily states to generate an interoceptive experience of intoxication.

So that's really cool, we ask participants to say how they think they'd feel after having a few drinks, quite some time before the actual experiment. And it turns out those expectancies are predicted by changes in metacognitive interoception.

And again, subjectively alcohol effects of light-headedness are predicted by changes in interoception (and importantly, not exteroception!). The same happens with anticipated alcohol effects, this time measured a couple weeks prior to the study.

Quite interestingly, there's sensitive null evidence for a main effect of alcohol on intero and extero performance. However, there's a range of individual variability in that effect, as usual.

That's very interesting! We are working on some cool EMA tools to study interoception, been thinking about adding a physiological component to it, but it's as you said complicated.

#cognition #consciousness #conssky #consci #PsychSciSky

APA does this thing where I get to write about it a bit in lay terms for a quick summary: growkudos.com/publications... Looking forward to combining this during my Marie Curie, with EEG, Pavlovian to Instrumental Transfer and if everything goes well, interoceptive conditioning!

Damn, I didn't know about this one! I really would love to come back to Brighton <3