The multidimensional assessment of body representation and interoception in multiple sclerosis.

BACKGROUND: The mental representation of the body (or body representation, BR) derives from the processing of multiple sensory and motor inputs and plays a crucial role in guiding our actions and in how we perceive our body. Fundamental inputs for BR construction come also from the interoceptive systems which refer to the whole bidirectional processes between the brain and the body. People with Multiple sclerosis (MS) show an abnormal multisensory integration which may compromise BR and interoception integrity. However, no study has evaluated possible deficits on distinct and dissociable dimensions of body representation (i.e., action-oriented, aBR; and a nonaction-oriented body representation, NaBR) and interoception (i.e., interoceptive accuracy, interoceptive sensibility, and interoceptive awareness) in MS. OBJECTIVE: In the present study, we aimed to determine whether participants with MS present changes in BR and interoceptive dimensions. METHODS: We performed comparison analyses on tasks and questionnaires tapping all BR and interoceptive dimensions between 36 people with relapsing-remitting MS (RRMS) and 42 healthy controls, and between 23 people with progressive MS (PMS) and 33 healthy controls. RESULTS: Overall, patients with MS exhibited lower interoceptive accuracy than matched controls. The RRMS group also showed higher visceral interoceptive sensibility levels. No differences were found in BR accuracy measures, but the PMS reported longer response times when performing the aBR task. CONCLUSION: These findings open a new issue on the role of inner-signal monitoring in the body symptomatology of MS and highlight the need for an accurate BR and interoceptive assessment in a clinical setting.

The relation between cognitive functioning and activities of daily living in normal aging, mild cognitive impairment, and dementia: a meta-analysis.

Literature suggests that dementia and, more generally, cognitive impairment affect the capacity to carry out activities of daily living (ADL) in aging. However, it is important to decipher the weight of specific cognitive domains and neurodegenerative profiles mainly related to ADL difficulties. A meta-analysis was conducted to investigate the nature and strength of the association between cognitive functioning and ADL in healthy older adults, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and dementia. A comprehensive search of the PubMed, PsycINFO (PROQUEST), and Scopus databases for cross-sectional or longitudinal studies up until December 2022. Our meta-analytic results revealed that: overall, instrumental ADL (IADL) showed a significant association with executive functioning, in particular, abstraction ability/concept formation, set-shifting, and processing speed/complex attention/working memory, regardless of type of participants (i.e., healthy older adults, MCI, and dementia); whereas ADL (both basic ADL, BADL, and IADL) significantly correlated with global cognitive functioning and long-term verbal memory, with a moderator effect of clinical condition (e.g., increasing ES based on the level of cognitive impairment). Moreover, visuospatial and language abilities significantly correlated with ADL, mainly when performance-based tasks were used for ADL assessment. These findings emphasize the importance of neuropsychological assessment in aging to early identify people most at risk of functional decline and shed light on the need to consider specific cognitive abilities in rehabilitation programs.

The bodily fundament of empathy: The role of action, nonaction-oriented, and interoceptive body representations.

Mental representations with bodily contents or in various bodily formats have been suggested to play a pivotal role in social cognition, including empathy. However, there is a lack of systematic studies investigating, in the same sample of participants and using an individual differences approach, whether and to what extent the sensorimotor, perceptual, and interoceptive representations of the body could fulfill an explanatory role in the empathic abilities.To address this goal, we carried out two studies in which healthy adults were given measures of interoceptive sensibility (IS), action (aBR), and nonaction-oriented body representations (NaBR), and affective, cognitive, and motor empathy. A higher tendency to be self-focused on interoceptive signals predicted higher affective, cognitive, and motor empathy levels. A better performance in tasks probing aBR and NaBR predicted, respectively, higher motor and cognitive empathy levels.These findings support the view that the various facets of the empathic response are differently grounded in the body since they diversely involve representations with a different bodily format.Individual differences in the focus on one's internal body state representation can directly modulate all the components of the empathic experience. Instead, a body representation used interpersonally to represent both one's own body and others' bodies, in particular in its spatial specificity, could be necessary to accurately understand other people's minds (cognitive empathy), while a sensorimotor body representation used to represent both one's own body and others' bodies actions, could be fundamental for the self-awareness of feelings expressed in actions (motor empathy).