title: Listen to your heart: the cultural shaping of interoceptive awareness and accuracy.
abstract: West African cultural contexts foster higher levels of attention to the bodily signals compared with the European American contexts. Interoception, or the processing of signals from the body, is a key component of emotional reactivity. Interoceptive awareness (i.e., the self-reported tendency to attend to physiological changes) and accuracy (i.e., the ability to accurately detect physiological changes) are distinct aspects of interoception. Does the West African cultural emphasis on interoceptive awareness affect individuals' abilities to accurately perceive physiological changes in response to emotional stimuli? West African and European American young adults watched a fear-inducing film clip and continuously rated their perception of heart rate changes in response to the clip. Actual heart rates were also recorded continuously. Cross-correlations were calculated between measures of perceived and actual heart rate. Although average levels of coherence between these measures were low across groups, West Africans showed higher levels of interoceptive awareness, but lower levels of interoceptive accuracy than European Americans. These results suggest that cultural scripts of attending to the body may affect coupling between actual and perceived physiological reactivity in the context of emotions. These results have implications for studying cultural shaping of somatic presentation of mood and anxiety disorders.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Georgetown University.
authors.forename: Yulia E
authors.initials: YE
authors.lastname: Chentsova-Dutton
authors.affiliation: African American Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University.
authors.forename: Vivian
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Dzokoto
mesh_terms: D000354:Africa, Western / Q000208:ethnology; D001364:Awareness; D044383:Black People / Q000523:psychology* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D003466:Cultural Characteristics; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006339:Heart Rate / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009040:Motion Pictures; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D014481:United States; D044465:White People / Q000523:psychology* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D055815:Young Adult; D001741:Black or African American