Emotion is often described as if the body were the final screen on which the mind displays its result: first a psychological event, then a racing heart, a tightened stomach or altered breath.
The review Interoceptive modulation of emotions, published in Current Opinion in Neurobiology in 2025 by Leo Zsembik, Poppy Oldroyd and Ritchie Chen, examines a less one-directional picture.
Internal physiology does not merely follow emotional processing.
Visceral signals can influence it.
The key word is modulation. It is more precise than saying that the body "creates" emotion or that emotions "come from the gut." Modulation means that internal signals can alter probability, intensity, timing, attention or interpretation within a larger emotional system.
What kind of paper this is
The article is a focused peer-reviewed review in Current Opinion in Neurobiology, volume 92, article 103049, published online in May 2025 for the June issue. It is not a single experimental study.
The authors review evidence concerning visceral pathways and the influence of interoceptive states on emotion, while discussing methodological challenges and future opportunities.
That source class matters because the field is heterogeneous.
A review can identify recurring patterns across cardiac, respiratory, gastrointestinal and neural research. It cannot erase differences among methods or transform all associations into causal findings.
The most responsible reading therefore asks which claims are supported by direct manipulation and which remain integrative hypotheses.
From body response to body influence
Classic theories of emotion have long disagreed over the role of bodily change.
At one extreme, bodily response is treated as central to emotional experience. At another, cognition or central neural appraisal is treated as primary, with physiological change following. Contemporary evidence makes the opposition too simple.
Emotion involves reciprocal loops.
A threatening interpretation can alter autonomic state. The altered state changes the sensory information returning to the brain. That information can influence attention, salience and experience, which can in turn alter physiology again.
The review is valuable because it places this reciprocity inside actual visceral pathways rather than treating "the body" as a metaphor.
Cardiac timing as an experimental lever
Cardiac interoception provides an unusually tractable way to study bodily modulation because each heartbeat creates a repeating physiological event.
Researchers can present stimuli at different phases of the cardiac cycle and examine whether fear, pain, memory or perceptual judgments change. Work in this area has shown that cardiac timing can modulate processing of emotionally salient information under some conditions.
The effect is not a message encoded by the heart.
The heartbeat alters baroreceptor and central physiological conditions, which can interact with neural processing.
This distinction is important. The cardiovascular system participates in the state in which perception occurs. It does not send semantic statements such as "this face is dangerous."
Respiratory state
Breathing is both automatic and voluntarily modifiable, which makes it especially interesting for interoceptive research.
Changes in respiratory phase, depth and load can influence arousal and sensation. Difficult breathing can generate strong affective responses. Controlled breathing practices can alter autonomic and subjective state, though effect sizes and mechanisms vary with protocol and population.
Respiration also demonstrates why interoception cannot be reduced to detection accuracy.
A person may notice respiratory resistance, interpret it as threat, tolerate it, regulate around it or avoid it. Those are separate processes.
A review of interoceptive modulation needs all of them.
Gastrointestinal and metabolic signals
The gut has become culturally overinterpreted.
There is genuine and rapidly developing science on vagal afferents, gastrointestinal sensation, nutrient state and gut-brain communication. Internal states related to hunger, satiety and gastric distension can alter motivation and affect.
But the existence of gut-brain pathways does not support the claim that every emotional judgment is "stored in the gut" or that a digestive sensation reveals relational truth.
The review's mechanistic orientation is useful precisely because it replaces vague gut language with questions about specific pathways, receptors, signals and central integration.
The body becomes more scientifically interesting as it becomes less mystical.
Visceral pathways are multiple
The vagus nerve is important but not singular.
Visceral information reaches the central nervous system through vagal and spinal pathways and through endocrine, immune and metabolic signaling. Different organ systems create different types of information.
Any claim about interoceptive modulation should therefore specify the pathway when possible.
A finding involving baroreceptors is not automatically evidence about gastric signals. A respiratory perturbation is not a general manipulation of bodily awareness.
This modality specificity is one of the main protections against overgeneralization.
Causality is easier to claim than to demonstrate
If anxious people report stronger bodily sensations, several explanations are possible.
Physiology may be more intense. Attention may be greater. Threat interpretation may amplify sensation. The report scale may be sensitive to beliefs. A third process may alter both anxiety and body perception.
Causal leverage improves when researchers manipulate bodily state, timing or sensory input while controlling alternatives.
Even then, an experimental effect in a laboratory may be small, context dependent or limited to one task.
The review's title should not be read as evidence that all emotions are strongly modulated by all forms of interoception.
The scientifically useful question is when, how much, through which pathway, and for whom?
Modulation can be adaptive or maladaptive
Bodily influence on emotion is not inherently beneficial.
A shift in cardiovascular or respiratory state can help an organism prioritize threat. In a different context, the same amplification can contribute to panic or symptom escalation. Hunger can appropriately alter motivation. Chronic or poorly interpreted internal signals can distort attention.
The value of a signal depends on the environment and the action it supports.
This is why a human-capacity framework should not aim to maximize sensitivity.
It should aim for calibration and flexibility.
Implications for emotion regulation
Emotion-regulation strategies are often described cognitively: reappraise a situation, redirect attention, change interpretation.
Interoceptive modulation adds a bodily layer.
Changing breathing, posture, activity, temperature or other physiological conditions can alter the state in which appraisal occurs. Conversely, cognitive reappraisal can alter physiological responses.
These are reciprocal routes rather than competing schools.
The review supports investigating body-to-brain modulation without treating it as a replacement for context, meaning or social conditions.
A breathing intervention cannot solve an abusive workplace. A cognitive strategy cannot make oxygen deprivation irrelevant.
Good regulation respects level of cause.
Direction matters in a reciprocal loop
A reciprocal system creates a causal-identification problem. If emotion changes physiology and physiology changes emotional processing, a correlation between the two does not reveal which direction dominated in a particular observation. Time-resolved measurement and experimental perturbation become especially important.
Studies that align stimuli with cardiac phase, alter respiratory load or manipulate bodily state can offer more leverage than studies that measure resting physiology after an emotional event. Even then, the manipulation may have several downstream effects, so mechanism requires converging evidence rather than one statistically significant contrast.
Effect size and ecological relevance are separate
A small laboratory effect can be theoretically important while having little direct impact on everyday behavior. Conversely, a subtle influence repeated thousands of times may matter cumulatively. Interoceptive modulation research needs both levels of analysis.
The first asks whether a bodily signal changes processing under controlled conditions. The second asks whether that change meaningfully alters decisions, relationships or symptoms outside the laboratory. Moving from one level to the other requires evidence, not rhetorical scale-up.
Context can reverse the value of the same signal
A rapid heartbeat before a sprint is appropriate preparation. The same heartbeat while resting can attract concern. Hunger can sharpen food-related motivation in one context and destabilize concentration in another. Bodily influence is therefore not only a matter of intensity but of fit between state, environment and goal.
This context dependence explains why interventions that change physiology can help in one setting and be irrelevant in another. Regulation is not the elimination of bodily modulation. It is the capacity to use or accommodate state without confusing it with the whole situation.
The organ-specific future of the field
Interoception is likely to become more organ specific as methods improve. Cardiac, respiratory and gastrointestinal signals differ in receptor biology, temporal dynamics and behavioral function. A model that explains heartbeat-related modulation may not transfer to nutrient sensing or breathlessness.
This specialization will make the literature look less unified, but scientifically it may be progress. "Interoception" can remain a useful family term while mechanisms are tested at the level where causal claims become tractable. The challenge is to connect organ-specific findings without forcing them into a fictitious general sensitivity.
Baseline physiology can alter experimental meaning
The same manipulation does not begin from the same body. Fitness, medication, sleep, menstrual or hormonal state, illness, caffeine and chronic stress can alter baseline physiology and the salience of a perturbation. These variables are sometimes treated as nuisance covariates, but they can also moderate the mechanism itself.
A rigorous modulation literature should record relevant bodily context and distinguish statistical control from biological explanation. Removing variance from a model does not make the source of that variance scientifically irrelevant.
Translation to intervention needs dose and mechanism
Breathing exercises, biofeedback and exposure to bodily sensations are often justified through interoceptive mechanisms. For translation to be credible, studies need to specify the dose, target pathway and expected mediator. "Regulates the nervous system" is too broad to function as a mechanism.
A useful intervention claim would identify what bodily variable changes, how that change is sensed, what emotional process is altered and whether the alteration predicts a meaningful outcome. The review points toward these questions without making them disappear.
Institute synthesis: state changes the evidence landscape
The Institute uses the phrase state changes the evidence landscape to describe a practical consequence of embodied cognition.
This is Institute synthesis, not language from Zsembik, Oldroyd and Chen.
When physiological state changes, the salience and felt plausibility of information can change. A risk may feel more urgent. An ambiguous cue may attract more attention. A memory may become easier to retrieve. This does not make the state an oracle.
It means that judgment occurs inside a changing organism.
For human-capacity work, the relevant skill is not to eliminate state influence but to recognize when state may be weighting evidence and to create enough space for cross-checking.
Human-AI systems and body-state asymmetry
AI systems can analyze language, images and data without sharing the user's visceral state.
That asymmetry can be useful. A system may help structure a problem when a person is highly aroused.
It can also be dangerous if the system is treated as possessing the emotional context it lacks. A model cannot infer the meaning of a user's bodily state simply from text, and a wearable feed does not close that gap.
Interoceptive science should therefore make human-AI systems more explicit about uncertainty.
The body adds information to human experience. It does not make internal meaning machine-readable by default.
Research challenges highlighted by the field
Interoceptive studies vary in modality, task, sample, physiological measurement and definition. Many effects are sensitive to timing and analytic choices. Some paradigms rely on indirect proxies. Clinical groups can differ in medication, fitness and comorbidity.
Replication across methods is therefore essential.
The strongest future studies will combine direct physiology, behavioral tasks, subjective reports and mechanistic manipulation while preregistering key analyses.
A field studying subtle body-state effects needs unusually clear measurement because expectancy and interpretation are part of the phenomenon itself.
What the evidence does not show
This review does not show that emotion is reducible to visceral sensation. It does not show that every organ state causally changes every emotion. It does not establish that increased interoceptive sensitivity is beneficial. It does not make the vagus nerve a universal explanation for affect. It does not justify diagnosing emotional states from consumer physiology.
The paper also does not prove that changing bodily state is sufficient to resolve problems whose causes are social, relational or institutional.
Its contribution is narrower and stronger: internal physiological signals participate in emotional processing through identifiable pathways, and the magnitude and meaning of that participation depend on mechanism and context.
Why this paper deserves a separate brief
The broader 2025 Annual Review by Greenwood and Garfinkel maps interoceptive mechanisms across emotion and clinical literatures.
Zsembik, Oldroyd and Chen offer a more focused mechanistic lens on modulation: how visceral pathways influence emotional processing.
The two papers overlap, but they do not duplicate one another.
One provides a broad field architecture. The other sharpens the body-to-emotion direction of the loop.
That distinction is exactly what a canonical library should preserve.
Research references
- Zsembik L, Oldroyd P, Chen R. Interoceptive modulation of emotions. Current Opinion in Neurobiology. 2025;92:103049. DOI: 10.1016/j.conb.2025.103049. PMID record checked 23 September 2026.
- Greenwood BM, Garfinkel SN. Interoceptive Mechanisms and Emotional Processing. Annual Review of Psychology. 2025;76:59-86. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-psych-020924-125202.
- Craig AD. How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 2002;3:655-666. DOI: 10.1038/nrn894.
- Khalsa SS et al. Interoception and Mental Health: A Roadmap. Biol Psychiatry Cogn Neurosci Neuroimaging. 2018;3(6):501-513. DOI: 10.1016/j.bpsc.2017.12.004.