Interoception and emotion

•Internal bodily signals impact behaviour and emotions.•Interoception is dissociable along objective, subjective and metacognitive psychological dimensions.•Alignment of interoceptive dimensions can predict emotional symptoms.•Interoceptive signalling of heart function, gut microbiota and immune responses offer new interventional targets for psychiatry.•Predictive coding models can be usefully applied to interoception.

Influential theories suggest emotional feeling states arise from physiological changes from within the body. Interoception describes the afferent signalling, central processing, and neural and mental representation of internal bodily signals. Recent progress is made in conceptualizing interoception and its neural underpinnings. These developments are supported by empirical data concerning interoceptive mechanisms and their contribution to emotion. Fresh insights include description of short-term interoceptive effects on neural and mental processes (including fear-specific cardiac effects), the recognition of dissociable psychological dimensions of interoception, and models of interoceptive predictive coding that explain emotions and selfhood (reinforced by structural anatomical models and brain and experimental findings). This growing grasp of interoception is enriching our understanding of emotion and its disorders.