Individual Differences in Body Awareness

Body sensations, such as heartbeats, breathing, or sensations from the stomach or gut, have been shown to be important for the experience of emotions. Additionally, the awareness of these sensations has repeatedly been shown to be related to differences in affective experience, emotional experience, and overall well-being. However, little is known about how patterns in the awareness of body sensations across different sensations may be important for how one experiences their emotions. Thus, through this project, I sought to develop three measures of individual differences in body awareness (BA granularity, BA complexity, and BA diversity) from similar measures used to examine individual differences in emotional experience.

BA Granularity = The specificity of one’s awareness of distinct body sensations
BA Complexity = How factorially complex patterns of awareness of body sensations are
BA Diversity = The range and evenness with which one is aware of different body sensations over time

For my dissertation, I ran a series of two experience sampling studies. The first examining how these novel individual difference measures were distinct from other measures of body awareness and interoception as well as looking at their relationship to affective (valence/arousal) experience. The second examining how these novel individual difference measures related to individual differences in emotional experience as well as overall psychological well-being.

Within this project, I gained ample experience with conceptualization, development of novel measures, and development of study design. Through this set of studies, I created both the design and implementation of the ecological momentary assessment (experience sampling) design. I also cleaned and analyzed the data, and presented the results as a dissertation. Within the data analysis, I utilized multi-level linear regression modeling approaches, correlational approaches and ANOVAs.