Bodily maps of emotion in psychiatry: A preregistered systematic review

Difficulties in emotional processing are common across a wide range of psychiatric disorders. Interoception, defined as the sensing, integration, and interpretation of internal bodily signals, is thought to contribute to the subjective bodily sensations that accompany affective states. However, despite the well-established role of emotion in psychopathology, current understanding remains incomplete regarding how emotion-related bodily sensations are represented and experienced in psychiatric populations. Bodily maps of emotions make it possible to visualize where individuals feel bodily changes during discrete emotions, offering a direct window into the interoceptive phenomenology of emotional experience. This paradigm therefore provides a promising approach for examining how altered interoceptive experience may contribute to emotional disturbances across psychiatric conditions. Following PRISMA guidelines, this systematic review synthesizes research using bodily maps to assess interoceptive emotional experiences in psychiatric populations. We identified altered interoceptive phenomenology related to emotions and highlighted underexplored areas in this field. We found altered interoceptive experiences of emotions are common across a large range of psychiatric states, including depression, schizophrenia, autism, and alcohol use disorder. Future studies should establish the mechanisms by which interoceptive experiences may contribute to difficulties in different emotional processes across its subcomponents. We hence propose new directions for the use of bodily maps to foster a more theoretically grounded and comprehensive analysis of interoceptive experiences in psychiatry.