Neural activity during interoceptive awareness and its associations with alexithymia-An fMRI study in major depressive disorder and non-psychiatric controls.

ABSTRACT:

Objective

Alexithymia relates to difficulties recognizing and describing emotions. It has been linked to subjectively increased interoceptive awareness (IA) and to psychiatric illnesses such as major depressive disorder (MDD) and somatization. MDD in turn is characterized by aberrant emotion processing and IA on the subjective as well as on the neural level. However, a link between neural activity in response to IA and alexithymic traits in health and depression remains unclear.

Methods

A well-established fMRI task was used to investigate neural activity during IA (heartbeat counting) and exteroceptive awareness (tone counting) in non-psychiatric controls (NC) and MDD. Firstly, comparing MDD and NC, a linear relationship between IA-related activity and scores of the Toronto

SUBMITTER: Wiebking C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4444750 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature