Loneliness and Interoceptive Accuracy in the Elderly Population

Master's Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject Psychology - Cognition, grade: 1,0, University of Vienna (Psychologische Fakultät), language: English, abstract: The present study aims to investigate the relationship between interoceptive accuracy and loneliness in the elderly population. Because of the negative consequences of atypical (too low or too high) interoceptive accuracy and the negative consequences of loneliness, an investigation of how these two constructs are linked to and might interact with each other is of major relevance. By combining two large areas, the one of loneliness and the one of interoception, which are both of great psychological interest, we intent to close a gap within the current research literature. Results might give us new insights into the perception (interoeptive and exteroceptive) of lonely persons. Loneliness is described as an unpleasant feeling of deficits in quantity or quality of social ties. Prior studies observed that lonely individuals displayed higher levels of alexithymia (emotional blindness). Furthermore, research in the field of interoception (the perception of the bodily state) discovered atypically low interoceptive abilities within highly alexithyimic individuals. Based on previous findings, we expected lonely individuals to show decreased levels of accurate interoceptive abilities together with reduced neural activity within the anterior insula, the somatosensory cortex (postcentral gyrus), the inferior frontal gyrus and the precentral gyrus. Brain areas previously associated with accurate interoceptive abilities. The data for the present fMRI study were collected within a sample of 28 participants older than 64 years. The extent to which a participant is capable of perceiving his/ her own bodily sensations (interoceptive accuracy) was measured via a heartbeat tracking task, during which the subject was required to perceive his/ her own heart rate and report the counted number of heartbeats. Additionally, several questionnaires, assessing loneliness, trait anxiety, depression and alexithymia, were administered and analysed.