Date of Award

Fall 2026

Abstract

The majority of theories of emotion posit that the body is central to the experience of emotion (see, e.g., Barrett & Bar, 2009; Barrett, 2006; Lindquist, 2013; James, 1884; Schacter & Singer, 1962; Gendron & Feldman Barrett, 2009; Stemmler, 2004; Kreibig, 2010; Russell, 2003). Thus, it is no surprise that body awareness, or the subjective awareness of internal sensations (Mehling et al., 2009), has gained much attention in emotion research. There is some evidence that body awareness (BA) is related to both affective experience (i.e., general feelings of pleasantness/unpleasantness and activation/deactivation; MacVittie et al., 2025a), emotional intensity (i.e., the strength with which one feels an emotion; MacVittie et al., 2025b; Ventura-Bort et al., 2021), and mood disorder symptom severity (e.g., anxiety and depression symptom severity; Velkoff & Smith, 2023b; Schmitz et al., 2021; Flasinski et al., 2020). However, these studies tend to focus on general awareness of the body as a whole and so fail to reflect how awareness may vary across different bodily sensations.

For my dissertation, I developed three measures of individual differences in BA that characterize how individuals differ in the specificity, complexity, and diversity of their awareness of different bodily sensations over time throughout daily life: BA granularity (the specificity of one’s awareness of distinct body sensations), BA diversity (the range and evenness with which one is aware of different body sensations over time), and BA complexity (how factorially complex patterns of awareness of body sensations are). These measures reflect similar constructs developed in the emotion literature (e.g., emotional granularity, emotional complexity, emodiversity) that has demonstrated how differences in these types of variability in subjective experience are important independent indicators of emotion and well-being (Barrett et al., 2001; Erbas et al., 2022; Ong & Bergeman, 2004; Larsen & Cutler, 1996; Quoidbach et al., 2014).

Across two studies, I explored how they relate to: (1) other body-related measures, including mean BA and interoceptive accuracy (i.e., objective detection of internal sensations; Study 1); (2) measures of comparable dimensions of emotional experience (i.e., emotional granularity, diversity, and complexity; Study 2); and (3) measures of emotional well-being, including self-reported affective and emotional experience (Studies 1-2), subjective well-being (Study 2), and mental health symptom severity (Study 2).

In Study 1, I conducted a 7-day experience sampling study during which I asked participants (N=121) to report on their awareness of 12 different body sensations (e.g., sensations from the chest area and how dry or moist their skin feels) multiple times per day and I calculated the novel measures of BA variability from these ratings. I found that BA granularity, BA complexity and BA diversity were unrelated to other measures of interoceptive ability (including retrospective self-reports of BA and task-based measures of interoceptive accuracy) as well as to average reported BA throughout experience sampling. However, greater BA complexity was related to self-reporting significantly less negative feelings throughout daily life and greater BA diversity was related to self-reporting significantly more negative feelings throughout daily life, even when controlling for average BA. These findings suggest BA granularity, complexity, and diversity reflect distinct facets of interoception that may be independently associated with affective experience.

For Study 2, I explored whether these individual differences in variability in BA are associated with their corresponding individual difference measures of emotional experience (i.e., emotional granularity, complexity, and diversity) as well as to several measures of emotional well-being (i.e., satisfaction with life, depression symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and somatic symptoms). To do this, participants completed a 7-day experience sampling protocol where they reported on their awareness of the 16 different body sensations from Study 1 as well as the extent to which they were experiencing 16 different emotion terms (drawn from previous studies). Results revealed that both BA granularity and BA diversity were positively related to their emotional experience counterparts (emotional granularity and emodiversity). These findings may suggest that variability in subjective experiences (e.g. how specific one’s experience is) reflects an individual difference in how one experiences the world and is translational across different, but related, types of experiences.

Taken together, this set of studies advances our understanding of the role of body sensations in emotional experience and will contribute to theoretical frameworks concerning how bodily activity contributes to emotional experience (Barrett & Bar, 2009; Barrett, 2006; Lindquist, 2013; James, 1884; Schacter & Singer, 1962; Gendron, 2009; Stemmler, 2004; Kreibig, 2010; Russell, 2003).

Document Type

Dissertation

First Advisor

Jolie B. Wormwood

Second Advisor

Emily Liquin

Third Advisor

Casey Roark

Department or Program

Psychology

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Download

Share

COinS