Changes in interoceptive accuracy related to emotional interference in somatic symptom disorder, 2024, Lee et al

Abstract

Objective
The somatic symptom disorder (SSD) is characterized by one or more distressing or disabling somatic symptoms accompanied by an excessive amount of time, energy and emotion related to the symptoms. These manifestations of SSD have been linked to alterations in perception and appraisal of bodily signals. We hypothesized that SSD patients would exhibit changes in interoceptive accuracy (IA), particularly when emotional processing is involved.

Methods
Twenty-three patients with SSD and 20 healthy controls were recruited. IA was assessed using the heartbeat perception task. The task was performed in the absence of stimuli as well as in the presence of emotional interference, i.e., photographs of faces with an emotional expression. IA were examined for correlation with measures related to their somatic symptoms, including resting-state heart rate variability (HRV).

Results
There was no significant difference in the absolute values of IA between patients with SSD and healthy controls, regardless of the condition. However, the degree of difference in IA without emotional interference and with neutral facial interference was greater in patients with SSD than in healthy controls (p = 0.039). The IA of patients with SSD also showed a significant correlation with low-frequency HRV (p = 0.004) and high-frequency HRV (p = 0.007).

Conclusion
SSD patients showed more significant changes in IA when neutral facial interference was given. These results suggest that bodily awareness is more affected by emotionally ambiguous stimuli in SSD patients than in healthy controls.

Open access, https://bmcpsychology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40359-024-01778-7

 

These results suggest that people who are ill have less energy, so when a significant portion of this energy is already spent on tuning out bodily signals such as pain & fatigue, they find it more difficult to tune out stimulus such as being interrupted by the visual stimuli of images, particularly images that are less obvious in their meaning, than healthy people do.

No sh*t Sherlock

 

Small sample, "no significant difference in the absolute values of IA between patients with SSD and healthy controls, regardless of the condition". It's just statistical noise. If they'd done it on another day they might have got results that went the opposite way (more interference with emotional faces than neutral ones) and they'd have written it up as proving their hypothesis just the same.

 

This is ridiculous enough that it makes the Stanford prison experiment look like a serious study. What is wrong with these people? This is clownish nonsense, it has zero validity, actually reminds of me of satirical experiments mocking the type of absurd research that went on in the mid 20th century.