Special Issue "Mindfulness, Interoception, and the Body"
A special issue of Brain Sciences (ISSN 2076-3425). This special issue belongs to the section "Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (10 January 2022) | Viewed by 13453
Special Issue Editors
Interests: interoception; bodily self-consciousness; body representations; chronic pain; multisensory integration; body image; autism; depersonalisation
Interests: interoception; body image; psychometrics; chronic pain
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Recent years have seen an explosion of public interest in mindfulness, and many research studies show its benefits for wellbeing. Over a similar time period, there has also been a huge increase in research on interoception (the brain’s processing and interpretation of signals from inside the body). This Special Issue aims to bring together new cutting-edge research investigating mindfulness and interoception in tandem.
Previous research has provided differing findings regarding possible interactions: some studies have indicated that the regular practise of mindfulness techniques is associated with increases in interoceptive awareness/sensibility and/or accuracy. Others have failed to demonstrate statistically significant effects. These conflicting findings are likely due to differences in the meditation practises studied, the experimental designs utilised, and the measures of interoception that were employed. Indeed, both mindfulness and interoception suffer from broad and often inconsistent definitions and this may have also contributed to the disparate results.
This Special Issue aims to take this field of research forward by bringing together well-controlled experimental studies, reviews, and meta-analyses to help to reach consensus. Papers may address questions such as: Which mindfulness practises are more strongly linked to changes to interoception? Which aspects of interoception are more likely to be affected by regular mindfulness practises? Can mindfulness practises be redesigned or tweaked to more effectively increase interoceptive awareness, and would this go hand-in-hand with increased wellbeing? Are there any potential problems with increasing interoceptive awareness and/or mindfulness in people with certain predispositions? What are the neural bases of changes in the way we experience and relate to our inner bodies?
We welcome contributions from psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy that address links between interoception and mindfulness practices. We will consider scientifically rigorous, well-controlled, and original papers describing behavioural, qualitative, psychophysiological and neuroimaging data, as well as theoretical papers, original reviews, and meta-analyses.
We look forward to receiving your contributions.
Dr. Jane E. Aspell
Dr. Jennifer Todd
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- Interoception
- Mindfulness
- Meditation
- Body awareness
- Wellbeing
- Insula
- Emotional awareness