What is the Best Interoception Questionnaire?

Hello👋! We are Róisín and Oliver, two Research Assistants at the lab, and today we are going to be discussing the tricky topic of self-report interoception questionnaires.

Interoception, essentially referring to one’s sensation of their internal body, is a fundamental phenomenon that we rely on in everyday life, and recent research highlights it as a trans-diagnostic underpinning of a variety of somatic and psychological difficulties.

While we know interoception is very important, the specifics are still being worked out. Debates continue on what the exactly interoceptions is, is not, and what it encompasses in terms of modalities or processes. Is it limited to visceral sensations (i.e., from internal organs)? Does it include proprioception (i.e., body position sense)? Pain? What about tactile sensations (i.e., touch and skin)? Does it include the interaction with higher-order processes like attention and beliefs?

This chaotic and moving landscape has been accompanied by the development and repurposing of different interoception (and interoception-adjacent) questionnaires, each with their own philosophies and approach. Carefully choosing a good measure of interoception is crucial to avoid adding to the jingle-jangle fallacy plaguing the field, in which discrepancies and contradictions of results “related to interoception” are driven by differences in what aspect of it is actually being measured.

Moreover, unlike exteroception (vision, audition, etc.), where researchers can easily manipulate external stimuli to validate a participant’s response, interoception presents a unique challenge: the stimuli originate from within the body. Because internal states are difficult to manipulate or observe directly, objective validation is complex. Nonetheless, especially as “objective” tasks like the Heart Beat Counting Task (HCT; Schandry, 1981) have their own methodological drawbacks, self-report questionnaires remain a scalable, practical, and widely-used tools for assessing interoception. Let’s explore the most popular and established questionnaires.

Questionnaires Overview

😨 Body Perception Questionnaire (BPQ)

The BPQ is one of the earliest interoception scales, originally built by Porges in 1993. This questionnaire focuses on the autonomic nervous system, involved in stress responses, and thus is mainly concerned with internal sensing when there are problems (e.g., ’tremor in my lips’, ‘general jitteriness’ being two items for body awareness). This makes the scale beneficial in clinical contexts to investigate maladaptive interoception, particularly in patients who have a dysregulated autonomic nervous systems. However, if you are interested in interoception in a wider context, other questionnaires may be more appropriate.

🧘‍♀️ Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA)

The Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) (the MAIA-2 being the most recent version) is another widely used questionnaire that accounts for body awareness in positive states - deriving from research on emotional regulation and pain. This questionnaire was created because Mehling et al. (2012) believed western medicine focused too much on bodily awareness as a maladaptive trait, even though research was increasingly finding health benefits from a sense of embodiment. It was specifically designed to assess mind-body therapies and was finalised based on data from individuals with various therapeutic backgrounds including yoga, tai chi and breath-work. The MAIA reconceptualises bodily awareness not only as an anxiety-related process but also an integral part of mindfulness. This translates to many of the questions focusing on metacognitive beliefs about one’s body and emotions, as well as some targetting more directly other mindfulness-related processes, such as attention regulation and non-reactivity. The MAIA includes subscales encompassing self-regulation abilities which - while important - might be conceptualized as distinct from core interoception.

🤧 Interoceptive Accuracy Scale (IAS)

More recently, the Interoceptive Accuracy Scale (IAS) (Murphy et al., 2019) took the opposite route, trying to remove contamination by meta-cognitive processes to focus on interoceptive accuracy (distinct from interoceptive attention). It includes 21 questions (“I can always accurately perceive when…”) pertaining discrete, clear, and “objectifiable” interoceptive events, hopefully being meaningful and consistently interpreted across participants (including those who have difficulty perceiving internal sensations).

🍃 Multimodal Interoception Questionnaire (Mint)

The Multimodal Interoception Questionnaire (Mint; Makowski et al., 2025) is the most recent interoception questionnaire, designed with the intention of addressing the caveats and limitations by building on established measures and synthesising the previous research and advances. Fundamentally, the Mint takes a “context-by-modality” approach to item development, encompassing a wide range of (seven) modalities of interoceptive experience (cardiac, respiratory, gastric, etc.) and also controlling for the contexts in which these may appear (covering negative (anxious) and positive (sexual) arousal states). The Mint also incorporates both adaptive and maladaptive aspects of interoception (interoceptive confusion), as well as items targeting different levels of processing.

Importantly, this questionnaire was developed with the aim of addressing some of the methodological shortcomings of previous interoception questionnaires, such as limiting interpretation Variance, state Dependency (the fact that respondents “anchor” their answers to their current physiological state rather than their general trait), and recency effects (recent, salient physical experiences disproportionately influencing scores), in particular by providing a clear contextual reference for each item. The validation study shows displayed strong correlations with the above questionnaires (suggesting that it can be used as a comprehensive replacement), while also demonstrating a superior predictive power for a variety of clinical conditions.

Others

• The Interoceptive Attention Scale (IATS; Gabriele et al., 2021): Attention to bodily signals. Designed as the orthogonal counterpart of the Interoceptive Accuracy Scale, also using consistent phrasing of all statements (‘Most of the time my attention is focused on…’).
• The Interoceptive Sensations Questionnaire (THISQ; Vlemincx et al., 2021): Neutral internal sensations (not emotionally valenced), including cardiorespiratory activation, deactivation, and gastroesophageal sensations.
• The Interoception Sensory Questionnaire (ISQ; Fiene, 2018): Designed to assess confusion about interoceptive bodily states unless these states are extreme (Alexisomia).
• The Interoceptive Confusion Questionnaire (ICQ; Brewer, 2016): Assesses confusion and misinterpretation of bodily signals.
• The Body Consciousness scale (BCS; Miller et al., 1981): Awareness of the “private body” (internal sensations) and “public body” (observable aspects of body)

In summary - which interoception questionnaire should I pick?

Interoceptive questionnaires are a product of their time, often molded by specific contextual demands and underlying theoretical frameworks. As our understanding of interoception evolves, so too do the tools we use to measure it. It might seem like the best option is to pick a questionnaire based on the interoception facet you are interested in (e.g., confusion, attention, accuracy, …), but as the field is still developing, and the theorethical models are in flux, it might be more useful to consider using a broader, more comprehensive, theory-agnostic questionnaire that captures multiple facets and modalities of interoception, such as the Mint.

References

Bergomi, C., Tschacher, W., & Kupper, Z. (2012). The Assessment of Mindfulness with Self-Report Measures: Existing Scales and Open Issues. Mindfulness, 4(3), 191–202. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-012-0110-9

Gabriele, E., Spooner, R., Brewer, R., & Murphy, J. (2021). Dissociations between self-reported interoceptive accuracy and attention: Evidence from the interoceptive attention scale. Biological Psychology, 168, 108243. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2021.108243

Kolacz, J., & Bjorum, E. (2023). Measuring Autonomic Symptoms with the Body Perception Questionnaire. The Traumatic Stress Research Consortium . https://www.traumascience.org/s/TSRCMarch2023Newsletter.pdf

Kolacz, J., Holmes, L., & Porges, S. W. (2018). Body perception questionnaire (BPQ) manual. Traumatic Stress Research Consortium.

Makowski, D., Neves, A., Benn, E., Bennett, M., & Poerio, G. (2025). The Mint Scale: A Fresh Validation of the Multimodal Interoception Questionnaire and Comparison to the MAIA, BPQ and IAS. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/8qrht_v1

Mehling, Price, Daubenmier, Acree, Bartmess, & Stewart. (2012). The Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA). Plos One, 7(11). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0048230.g001

Mehling, W. E., Acree, M., Stewart, A., Silas, J., & Jones, A. (2018). The Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness, Version 2 (MAIA-2). PLOS ONE, 13(12), e0208034. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0208034

Miller, L. C., Murphy, R., & Buss, A. H. (1981). Consciousness of body: Private and public. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 41(2), 397–406. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.41.2.397

Murphy, J., Brewer, R., Plans, D., Khalsa, S. S., Catmur, C., & Bird, G. (2019). Testing the independence of self-reported interoceptive accuracy and attention. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 73(1), 115–133. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747021819879826

Paola Solano Durán, Morales, J.-P., & Huepe, D. (2024). Interoceptive awareness in a clinical setting: the need to bring interoceptive perspectives into clinical evaluation. Frontiers in Psychology, 15(1244701). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1244701

Porges. (1993). Body Perception Questionnaire. Umd.edu. https://terpconnect.umd.edu/~sporges/body/body.txt

Schandry, R. (1981). Heart Beat Perception and Emotional Experience. Psychophysiology, 18(4), 483–488. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8986.1981.tb02486.x

Sherrington C. S. (1906). The integrative action of the nervous system. Yale University Press.

Vlemincx, E., Walentynowicz, M., Zamariola, G., Van Oudenhove, L., & Luminet, O. (2021). A novel self-report scale of interoception: the three-domain interoceptive sensations questionnaire (THISQ). Psychology & Health, 38(9), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/08870446.2021.2009479