Effect of heightened interoceptive awareness among smokers on misinterpretation of emotional arousal

We investigated the differences in the emotional experiences of people who smoke and have damaged interoceptive awareness. Interoception is the sensation of the physiological condition of the body, and it has 2 biases: neglect and amplification of bodily feedback. We recruited 72 participants and divided them into 4 groups according to smoking status and interoceptive bias based on their scores on the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness. All groups assessed their physiological and subjective arousal before and after watching video clips (positive-low arousal, positive-high arousal, negative-low arousal, negative-high arousal, neutral). The results indicated that people with amplification (vs. neglect) bias who smoked showed stronger subjective arousal to neutral stimuli. In contrast, people with amplification (vs. neglect) bias who did not smoke showed stronger subjective arousal to positive stimuli. These findings suggest that people who smoke and have an amplification bias could be more likely to misinterpret neutral emotional stimuli, leading to an increased craving for smoking.