Semantic Organization of Interoceptive Sensations in Mitral Valve Prolapse Patients

The primary aim of this research is to study a specificity of semantic organization of interoceptive sensations in mitral valve prolapse (MVP) patients and to demonstrate the characteristics’ association of subjective semantic interoception in MVP patients with MVP clinical picture and patient's emotive experience. We tested 134 MVP patients and 73 healthy subjects. The research suggested that MVP patients differ from healthy individuals in specificity of subjective semantic of interoception. All interoceptive vocabularies of MVP patients exceeded vocabularies of healthy individuals in terms of size. Qualitative and statistical analysis showed the “link” between physical and emotional characteristics, high representation of “distressful” characteristics and more metaphoric way of interoceptive experience description, that proves the determination of semantic organization of interoceptive feelings in patients by their emotive experience. All described characteristics are more intense in patients with anxiety disorder.