Does Long-Term Training in a Water Immersion Environment Change Interoception?

Yasuhiro Baba,Koyuki Ikarashi,Naofumi Otsuru,Tomomi Fujimoto,Daisuke Sato,Koya Yamashiro

doi:10.3390/ijerph181910259

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate individual interoception by comparing the responses of swimmers and baseball players when exposed to specific water environments, depending on training content and environment. Forty-eight healthy male university students were evaluated for their interoceptive response (accuracy, sensibility, and awareness) and heart rate following 25 min of water immersion (WI) at 35 °C. We assessed three conditions: pre-WI, during WI, and post-WI. The results indicated that interoceptive accuracy (IAcc) did not differ between groups because both swimming and baseball do not require emotional expression, as opposed to an activity such as dance. The heart rate was significantly decreased at post-WI compared to that at pre-WI. The IAcc of post-WI presented as higher than that of pre-WI. In addition, there was a significant negative correlation between the ratio of IAcc and that of HR among subjects. Moreover, the attention regulation subscale of the MAIA changed in the WI environment and the ratio of IAcc was negatively correlated with that of the not-distracting subscale of the MAIA. These results suggested that interoception did not differ among the athletes who had long-term training, which enabled them to acquire multi-modal sensorimotor integration, compared to that of non-athlete control participants. We conclude that interoception did not differ among athletes who had long-term training compared to that of non-athlete control participants.

Highlights

Introduction published maps and institutional affilInteroception is defined as the perceptual process that gives us a sense of the physical body from within [1,2], a topic on which sensory research began 100 years ago [3].Physiological mechanisms acting as interoceptive stimuli comprise proprioceptive and visceroceptive processes, such as heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, and gastrointestinal or genitourinary activity [4]
Results from the Pearson correlation analysis revealed that the change in interoceptive accuracy (IAcc) preand post-intervention was significantly correlated with the changes in heart rate (HR)
Results from the Pearson correlation analysis revealed that the change in IAcc pre-and post-intervention was significantly correlated with the changes in HR (r = −0.423, 10 p =of0.003, Figure 6A), but not with MAIA (r = −0.296, p = 0.041, Figure 6B) and the ratio of timeestimation estimation accuracy accuracy (TEAcc) (r = 0.315, p = 0.029, Figure 6C), and not with other parameters

Summary

Introduction

Interoception is defined as the perceptual process that gives us a sense of the physical body from within [1,2], a topic on which sensory research began 100 years ago [3]. Physiological mechanisms acting as interoceptive stimuli comprise proprioceptive and visceroceptive processes, such as heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, and gastrointestinal or genitourinary activity [4]. Sensations arising from homeostatic processes in the body (e.g., heart rate changes, temperature, hunger, arousal, touch, itch, and gut motility) are crucially related to the conscious experience of affect [5,6,7,8] and to the creation of selfhood [2]. The first is interoceptive accuracy (IAcc), which is the objective accuracy of perceiving bodily signals such as heart rate (HR) and gastric activity [13,14,15,16].

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Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion