Associations Between Autism and Self-Reported Dimensions of Interoception

Despite a wealth of research on autism and interoception, there is not a clear consensus about which dimensions of interoception (if any) are related to autism. This study explored whether self-reported interoceptive accuracy, attention and evaluation are related to autism diagnosis and autistic traits. We analysed questionnaire responses from 519 participants, including 232 autistic participants. We found that people with an autism diagnosis had more negative interpretations of their bodily signals than people without an autism diagnosis, and increasing autistic traits in a general population sample were associated with higher interoceptive attention, lower interoceptive accuracy and higher negative interoceptive evaluation. Our findings suggest that interoceptive evaluation should be a priority for future research.Lay AbstractAutism is thought to be linked to differences in the way people notice, process and understand signals coming from inside of their bodies. This study explored how both autistic traits and autism diagnoses are associated with the processing of bodily signals. We found that among 519 participants, having more autistic traits meant that people paid more attention to body signals, reported lower accuracy at detecting them and had more negative interpretations of those signals. Autism diagnoses were associated with more negative interpretations of bodily signals.