How do you really feel – now? An investigation of the validity of the heartbeat counting task in binge drinking and severe alcohol use disorder

Details

Supervisors

Maurage, Pierre ; Desmedt, Olivier

Faculty

Faculté de psychologie, logopédie, sexologie et des sciences de la famille

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences psychologiques, à finalité approfondie

Abstract

Interoception refers to the representation of the internal state. Behavioural studies report that chronic alcohol use is associated with reduced ability to detect and process interoceptive signals (i.e., interoceptive accuracy). These studies, assessed interoceptive accuracy using solely the heartbeat counting task (HCT; Schandry,1981). However, recent concerns have been raised regarding the validity of this task (e.g., Desmedt et al., 2018). A growing body of literature has reported that non-interoceptive processes might explain performance at this task. The present study investigated, in subclinical and clinical pattern of alcohol use, whether reduced interoceptive accuracy was still observed when controlling for this involvement of non-interoceptive processes. Two samples (i.e., patients suffering from severe alcohol use disorder and matched control participants & binge drinkers and matched control participants) performed original and adapted (i.e., a task were participants are explicitly asked to refrain from using non-interoceptive strategies) HCT (Desmedt et al., 2018). Involvement of two non-interoceptive strategies was also investigated using a time estimation task and assessing participants’ knowledge about heart rate. Results showed an overall reduced performance between original and adapted HCT, independently of alcohol use pattern. We found no effect of time estimation strategy or knowledge about heart rate. We found, however, an effect of group but only for the binge drinking sample, and only at adapted HCT. While this study had several limits (e.g., small samples), the fact that participants showed an overall decrease in their performance between the two HCT might indeed show that performance at this task relies mainly on the involvement of non-interoceptive processes. We therefore urge for the need to develop effective behavioural measures of interoception accuracy.