How do altered interoceptive profiles in anxiety and depression differ from those in neurodevelopmental conditions?

Interoception is not one ability but several

Interoception is the sense of what is happening inside your body—your heartbeat, breathing, hunger, and other internal signals. Researchers split it into distinct dimensions: the raw signals themselves, how accurately a person can detect them, how the brain processes them, and how a person interprets them in context [1]. This matters because two conditions can both be called 'altered interoception' while differing in which dimension is affected.

A person might be poor at detecting a heartbeat but still pay close attention to internal sensations, or detect signals accurately but interpret them as threatening. Anxiety, depression, and neurodevelopmental conditions are each associated with changes in interoception, but the changes are not identical across these dimensions [1].

In anxiety and depression, attention and interpretation shift more than raw accuracy

In anxiety and depression, the emotional profile is characterized by altered interoception, and the review links these conditions to changes across interoceptive dimensions including signal accuracy and higher-order interpretation [1]. The emphasis in these conditions tends to fall on how internal signals are appraised—what a racing heart or a tight chest is taken to mean—rather than on a simple deficit in sensing them.

A large-scale analysis of the Interoceptive Accuracy Scale examined how self-reported interoceptive accuracy relates to mood, anxiety, and psychopathological traits [2]. That work supports the idea that interoceptive scores connect to emotional symptoms, but it does not establish that anxiety or depression share a single interoceptive signature with each other or with other conditions [2].

In neurodevelopmental conditions, the profile spans different dimensions

Neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism are also characterized by altered emotional profiles and distinct changes in interoception [1]. The review treats autism alongside anxiety, depression, and other conditions as having its own pattern of interoceptive change, not as a variant of the anxiety profile [1].

The mega-analysis of the Interoceptive Accuracy Scale included neurodevelopmental traits among its dispositional correlates, testing whether interoceptive accuracy scores relate to those traits alongside mood and psychopathology measures [2]. This indicates that neurodevelopmental traits are part of the same broad mapping of interoception to psychological characteristics, but the analysis was not designed to contrast neurodevelopmental profiles directly against anxiety or depression profiles [2].

The comparison is inferred, not measured

The most important limit on the answer is that the available evidence does not include a direct comparison between anxiety/depression and neurodevelopmental conditions on the same interoceptive measures [1][2]. The review evaluates interoceptive dimensions across many conditions but does not set up a head-to-head contrast between these groups [1], and the mega-analysis examines correlations with traits rather than group differences [2].

What can be said is that both categories show altered interoception, but the alterations are described across different dimensions—accuracy, attention, neural processing, and interpretation—and the specific pattern attached to each condition is not yet pinned down by direct comparison [1]. The review notes that therapeutic approaches targeting interoceptive mechanisms may be useful across conditions with emotional alterations, which is consistent with shared mechanisms but does not prove shared profiles [1].

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