Sensing your body (‘Interoception’) is everywhere in theories of mental health. But when we tested how well hundreds of people sensed their heart and lungs, the link to symptoms was almost nowhere to be found. 💣 🚨New @natmentalhealth.nature.com paper 🚨🎉 asks why 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s44...

New paper in PNAS! When the mind wanders, it often drifts to the body. We call this "body-wandering". These thoughts are often negative, but are associated with reduced ADHD & depression symptoms, driven by a distinct interoceptive-allostatic brain signature. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2520822123

The Affective Science Lab will be well-represented at this years @affectscience.bsky.social conference!

Hey everyone! I’m leading a student mentoring table at SPSP on Family Planning and Pregnancy during graduate school. I'm trying to collect some useful data: If you had kids in academia (any career stage)-- I would be grateful if you filled out this 10-question survey: forms.office.com/r/JeLL5cBk3w

The #SCIMaP team announces a major update: an analysis of the economic impacts of the White House's NIH FY26 budget. Bottom-line, we estimate $46B in total economic loss, 202K lost jobs, and impacts in communities nationwide. Interactive map and shareable report: scienceimpacts.org/fy26 a 🧵

Two headlines in the New York Times today.

Ever wonder how many lives have been saved by NIH-funded research - including your own? Enter any medical condition and instantly see how your tax dollars transformed science into survival. www.ourhealthroi.com

Our Health ROI

Explore how your tax dollars fund life‑saving medical research.

ourhealthroi.com

🙏 We need your help 🙏 The government continues to cancel grants at both NIH and NSF to censor science it doesn't like. We're tracking terminations to organize and advocate. Please report your terminated grants: NIH: forms.gle/J2znQ7y7YpeP... NSF: airtable.com/appGKlSVeXni... w/ @noamross.net

This is really important. How can we counter this false narrative?

Maya Sen@mayasen.bsky.social · last yr.

Ok so yeah, this has quickly become the #1 misunderstanding about the canceled grants the grants are not “subsidies” or “entitlements” to Harvard or Princeton or whatever they aren’t going into universities’ endowments they are competitive contracts won by these universities to do research

So awesome to see a community-based-participatory approach to interoception research in practice. Major kudos to this team for publishing on patient priorities!

Breaking through the mind-body divide: patient priorities for interoception research

Interoception—sensation, interpretation, and prediction of bodily signals—is reliably disrupted across a wide range of mental health conditions. A gro…

sciencedirect.com

This part of the Tufts declaration somehow warms my heart the most: a full-throated defense of Rümeysa Ötürk's op-ed criticizing the Tufts president, signed by the Tufts president! This is how it's supposed to be!

Joshua J. Friedman@joshuajfriedman.com · last yr.

"The University declares that this opinion piece was not in violation of any Tufts policies. Further, no complaints were filed with the University or, to our knowledge, outside of the University about this op-ed."

What happens when our stream of consciousness turns inward, towards the body? Our new fMRI study of 536 individuals finds that 'body-wandering' is associated with distinct patterns of brain connectivity, physiology, affect, and mental health: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I don’t think this is really a matter of doing “rigorous science”. It is just a matter of moral decency and humanity.

‘We’re hurting.’ Trans scientists call for recognition and support from research community

“Rigorous science demands” it, authors write in landmark commentary

science.org

Rümeysa's legal team is coordinating a fundraiser for her and her family to help them deal with this crisis, including medical costs since ICE has kept Rümeysa from accessing all her medications. Please donate if you're able:

Justice for Rumeysa Ozturk

Dear Friends, Allies, and Supporters,

chuffed.org

If you're at #CNS2025, be sure to check out the poster presentation Monday morning (D139) by our wonderful mentee Josh on flatsurfer -- our soon-to-be-released python package to create limbic-centered flat maps of the cerebral cortex. w/ @jtheriault.bsky.social

now.tufts.edu/2025/03/20/r... shocked by this! Sam Sommers’ book is what made me interested in psychology, and is what made me choose to go to Tufts. Sending love to his family and colleagues.

Remembering Psychology Professor Sam Sommers

Sam Sommers, longtime professor at Tufts, studied the psychological causes and consequences of racism

now.tufts.edu

"If it continues like this, the United States will not score as a democracy when we release [next year's] data," said Staffan Lindberg, head of the Varieties of Democracy project, run out of Sweden's University of Gothenburg. www.cbc.ca/news/world/t...

ANALYSIS | U.S. could lose democracy status, says global watchdog | CBC News

Possibly defying a court order. Urging his Justice Department to prosecute nemeses. Repeatedly calling the media 'illegal.' Declaring a predecessor's pardon null and void. U.S. President Donald Trump ...

cbc.ca

CASL is showing up for Society for Affective Science this week!

#proud #workWife www.unc.edu/posts/2025/0...

Emotion detective tracks effects of stress | UNC-Chapel Hill

Doctoral candidate Adrienne Bonar studies the many factors that shape people’s feelings.

unc.edu

Physio people -- when you have messy data, what's your philosophy on filtering? Under filter and discard a lot of data due to excess noise OR potentially over filter and smooth true signal? In this case i'm working with PPG. #psychophysiology #interoception

Incredible. Thank You!

a crowd of people are sitting in a theatre applauding .

Alt: a crowd of people are sitting in a theatre applauding .

media.tenor.com

Alt CDC (they/them)@altcdc.altgov.info · 2y ago

The entire archive of CDC datasets can be found here. HUGE shoutout to data archivists- this work is important 👏🙌🏻 archive.org/details/2025...

I’m here for biologists making a big fucking stink but I think psychologists should get in on the action too.

Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them)@jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · 2y ago

Sooooo if this whole "biological sex" EO is really happening, biologists are going to make as much noise about it as possible, right? Professional societies, universities, individual research groups? It's really incumbent on us (that's a "biologists us" here) to make a BIG FUCKING STINK

I am delighted this work by @gerardosalvato.bsky.social et al on the relationship between disturbances in the sense of body ownership & temperature regulation is finally published! doi.org/10.1038/s414... Here is a thread on the long, scientific whodunit 1/11

The contribution of cutaneous thermal signals to bodily self-awareness - Nature Communications

Salvato et al. reveal that thermosensory signals may play a role in bodily self-awareness. Their study on right-brain stroke patients highlights behavioural and neural contribution of temperature and ...

doi.org

Gerardo Salvato@gerardosalvato.bsky.social · 2y ago

Cold hands, altered ownership? We link disturbed body ownership in stroke patients to reduced hand temperature and impaired thermoception. The right Insula & Parietal hubs are key players. We are excited to share our new findings @naturecomms.bsky.social ▶️ rdcu.be/d5SDU

📢 Help spread the word! UNH is hiring an Assistant Professor in Social Psychology with a specialization in social cognition. Review of applications starts on January 20th! jobs.usnh.edu/postings/63725 Come work with me in New Hampshire!!

What is your favorite R function you've learned this 2024? Mine: I've loved understanding !! and enquo from rlang. #rstats

There are now nearly 5000 papers on #interoception. And the output over the last 4 years is more than the previous 59. 🤯

This collaboration was so fun! We found evidence that emotional attention & clarity were higher in social v nonsocial contexts and when interacting with close v nonclose others. Participants with MDD showed enhanced emotional clarity in social v nonsocial settings.

Social contexts are associated with higher emotional awareness than nonsocial contexts: Evidence in a sample of people with and without major depressive disorder - PubMed

Growing evidence suggests that social contexts may prompt qualitatively distinct experiences of emotions than nonsocial contexts. In this study of people's naturalistic daily emotional experiences, we...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

This one has been long in the making! We find preliminary evidence that teens with more similar vmPFC representations of positive affect (in particular) are more like to be friends/be in the same friend group. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39412190/

Proximity Within Adolescent Peer Networks Predicts Neural Similarity During Affective Experience - PubMed

Individuals befriend others who are similar to them. One important source of similarity in relationships is similarity in felt emotion. In the present study, we used novel methods to assess whether gr...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Check out our new chapter on Interoception's role in Social and Emotional Cognition. We begin by exploring WHY you might expect interoception to predict socioemotional cognition in the first place... Let us know what you think!

The Role of Interoception in Emotion and Social Cognition

We begin this chapter by clarifying our working definition of interoception and discussing how interoception fits within the larger picture of human brain functional evolution. We focus on the role of...

link.springer.com