Hi everyone! Kelly Mahler, occupational therapist, and I just wanted to take a quick moment to talk about the hottest trends in research. More specifically, the hottest trends in interoception research.
The Field of Interoception Research
This field of interoception is really in its infancy. The term was defined in 1906 by a gentleman named Sir Charles Sherrington. But his work was really largely ignored until almost 100 years later, when the brilliant neuroscientist, Dr. Bud Craig, began studying interoception in his lab. In 2002, Dr. Craig published one of the most well-cited interoception studies to date. Since then, because of Dr. Craig’s work, interoception research has skyrocketed, and now it is one of the hottest, most widely studied topics in neuroscience.
Interoception is a really exciting field. We’re learning new things every day, but we have a really long way to go in truly understanding interoception. What I’m especially curious about is how does interoception impact our daily lives and how can we enhance our interoceptive experience so that we can thrive from a physical and emotional health perspective.
Our Interoception Research
I’ve been working with a lot of excellent collaborators; seasoned researchers, up and coming researchers, graduate students. I’ve been collaborating with a lot of different people to further the study of interoception. One of my favorite things to investigate is interoception-based supports. So, how can we help each person to learn more about their own unique interoception sensations and what those sensations mean for them? That’s where The Interoception Curriculum comes in.
We’re studying extensively the effectiveness of The Interoception Curriculum. In fact we’re in year six of our research. We’ve published some of our papers and have a lot of other manuscripts in the works. Some really exciting outcomes have come about as a result of The Interoception Curriculum; really positive growth in areas such as emotion regulation, and emotion self-understanding.
In our last blog and recent content, we talked about alexithymia. Our research is now finding that using The Interoception Curriculum can really help a person to begin to understand not only their inner sensations, but use those sensations to be able to understand exactly how they’re feeling. This means it can be helpful in improving that experience of so-called alexithymia.
If you want to follow along with our research, please check out our brand new research page. Check out some of our studies that we’ve published, and keep track of our studies that will be forthcoming. We have a lot of exciting things to share with you!
Until next time.
Want to dive into The evidence-based Interoception Curriculum and see what all the buzz is about? Check it out here!
