Many thank’s for your support, Micah!

I would like to warmly thank Joey Khalil, our developer, as well as my co-authors @pierremaurage.bsky.social, @mateoleganes.bsky.social, Pauline Billaux, and @joelbillieux.bsky.social. The development and validation of this tool have been a long but exciting journey

With InteroMap, we aim to open new empirical possibilities to put core interoception models to the test and to address clinically relevant questions

While we developed it to address questions in interoception, the tool may also be used to measure the experience of external bodily stimulation and to investigate multisensory integration

Validation is, of course, a never-ending process; future studies are needed to test InteroMap’s ability to measure momentary and prospective interoceptive phenomenology, as well as stable individual differences

In a large, preregistered study (see preprint), we compared InteroMap to emBODY. Overall, InteroMap demonstrated superior construct validity and usability
www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Compared to previous tools, InteroMap combines valence & intensity ratings and front/back views with anatomical landmarks. We provide instructions to implement it in Qualtrics (github.com/interomap/in...) and to visualise and extract data (github.com/interomap/pr...)

We therefore developed InteroMap, an open-access, open-source bodily mapping tool designed for precise and comprehensive mapping of self-reported bodily sensations

We also think the bodily mapping methodology itself can be improved. For example, emBODY measures the intensity of bodily sensations but does not capture their valence, although this may be a key driver of our behaviours

The most widely used tool, emBODY, has already provided important insights into bodily sensations, particularly in emotions. Yet we believe bodily mapping should be taken further in interoception research, well beyond emotions

Bodily mapping is a promising way to capture this dimension, as it is a user-friendly method that lets individuals report sensations across their entire body

This focus has meant that an essential part of interoception has been underexplored: the subjective experience of our internal bodily sensations, or interoceptive phenomenology

Yet decades of research show that interoceptive detection abilities are very difficult to measure validly and non-invasively with performance-based tasks, and that they may not be the most predictive of other psychological constructs

For a long time, the field of interoception has largely focused on objective and self-reported abilities to detect internal bodily signals, neglecting other dimensions (e.g., interpretation of signals)