Most individuals are acquainted with the conventional five senses—touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste—but not everyone is aware of the additional sense known as interoception.
Interoception pertains to our awareness of the body’s internal state, enabling us to perceive and interpret internal signals regulating vital functions such as hunger, thirst, body temperature, and heart rate. Despite its often subtle presence, interoception plays a crucial role in ensuring the optimal functioning of every bodily system.
This sense operates by alerting us when our body may be experiencing imbalance, prompting actions such as reaching for a drink when thirsty or removing a jumper when feeling overheated. Interoception also holds significance for mental health, contributing to various psychological processes including decision-making, social interaction, and emotional well-being. Disruptions in interoception are frequently reported in many mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, and eating disorders, potentially explaining the overlap in symptoms observed across different disorders.
Despite its importance across health domains, there remains a dearth of knowledge regarding potential differences between men and women in their accuracy of sensing internal bodily signals. Research examining interoceptive differences between cisgender men and women—the latter being individuals whose gender identity aligns with their biological sex—has yielded mixed findings. Understanding potential gender differences in interoception is essential as it may enhance comprehension of variations in mental and physical health outcomes.
Pooling data from 93 studies investigating interoception in men and women, our analysis focused on tasks assessing the perception of heart, lung, and stomach signals across various contexts.
Our findings revealed significant differences in interoception between men and women, with women exhibiting lower accuracy, particularly in heart-focused tasks, and to some extent, lung-focused tasks. These disparities do not appear to be attributable to factors such as effort exerted during tasks or physiological variations like body weight or blood pressure.
While differences across heartbeat tasks were evident, results for lung and stomach perception tasks were less conclusive, possibly due to the limited number of studies in these domains. Further research is needed to ascertain whether gender differences exist in the perception of signals from these bodily organs. The findings hold implications for understanding the gender disparities observed in the prevalence of common mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression, which tend to affect more women than men starting from puberty.
Various theories have been proposed to elucidate these disparities, including genetic, hormonal, personality, and environmental factors. However, given the significance of interoception for overall well-being, differences in interoceptive abilities may contribute partially to the observed gender differences in mental health outcomes.
Recognizing gender differences in interoceptive signal perception may also inform the development of more effective treatments for mental illness. Emerging studies suggest that improving interoception may benefit mental health, with some evidence indicating that men may rely more on interoceptive signals, particularly from the heart, in processing emotions compared to women.
Moreover, disparities in interoceptive attention between men and women suggest that tailored interventions targeting interoception may yield differential effectiveness across genders. Future research should investigate the underlying causes of these differences, considering physiological, hormonal, and socio-cultural factors, to advance our understanding and treatment of mental health conditions.
