Bringing Interoception Into the Clinical Setting of Alcohol Use Disorder
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Background. Interoception is increasingly implicated in alcohol use disorder (AUD), yet clinical translationremains limited by construct conflation, dependence on cardiac tasks, and uncertainty about whether atypicalbodily processing reflects a stable deficit or a context-sensitive process.Methods. This critical narrative review integrates AUD-specific behavioral, psychophysiological,neuroimaging, alcohol-administration, and intervention evidence using an explicit hierarchy that separatesdirect interoceptive measures from mechanistic and translational support.Results. Direct studies indicate that lower cardiac-task performance can coexist with heightened subjectivebodily attention, while recent validity work shows that heartbeat-counting scores cannot be treated as pureindices of bodily-signal detection. Acute alcohol, stress-cue, and ambulatory findings further indicate that thebehavioral significance of bodily signals depends on how they are generated, attributed, and linked toalcohol-related action.Conclusions. The central clinical proposition is not to increase bodily awareness indiscriminately, but toimprove the detection, differentiation, attribution, and appraisal of bodily states within context. Thissignal-context-action framework generates testable hypotheses for assessment, relapse monitoring, andtreatment matching within established AUD care
Language: English
Subfield: Epidemiology
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7223246222