Increased interoceptive awareness in pregnancy and its relationship with body image dissatisfaction and depressive symptoms

Interoception is the sense of the physiological condition of the body originating from within its internal organs (Craig, 2003). It crucially contributes to the formation and maintenance of bodily self-consciousness, as highlighted by recent theoretical models (Craig, 2003; Damasio, 2010) and experimental evidence (Aspell et al., 2013; Suzuki, Garfinkel, Critchley, & Seth, 2013). Pregnancy is a period of profound physical and psychophysiological changes, which happen in a relative short time interval to the women’s body. In a two-testing session design, we measured: interoceptive accuracy (via the heartbeat counting task, Schandry, 1981, and the cardio-dynamic detection task, Azevedo et al., 2016); interoceptive sensibility (via the MAIA questionnaire, Mehling et al., 2012); body dissatisfaction (via the BASS, Cash, 2015 and the PFRS, Skouteris et al., 2005 questionnaires) and depressive symptoms (via the EDPS questionnaire, Cox, Holden, & Sagovsky, 1987), in a sample composed by pregnant (N= 13; Age: Mean 33.38 years, SD ±4.84) and age-matched non-pregnant women (N= 13; Age: Mean 33.38 years, SD ±4.84). Results show that interoceptive accuracy was higher in pregnant women compared to the non-pregnant ones. This was especially true in the late (third trimester) compared to the early stage (second trimester) of the pregnancy. Interestingly, we also found that the more pregnant women became accurate in detecting their heartbeat along the pregnancy, the more they became satisfied about their body. Finally, correlation analysis shows that the more women were accurate in detecting their bodily signals the less they reported depressive symptoms. This is the first study that investigates the relationship between interoception, body dissatisfaction and depressive symptoms in pregnancy. Our results could pave the way for future theoretical investigations and, could have important clinical applications not only for pregnant women’s well-being but also for the newborns.