Trial reportPsychophysiology2020
The practice of meditation is not associated with improved interoceptive awareness of the heartbeat.
Trial report in Psychophysiology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 70 citations in OpenAlex.
- Neural correlates of altered interoception in depressive and anxiety disorders: a systematic review and meta-analysis.European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience · 2026Pooled it
- A meta-analysis of the effects of mindfulness meditation training on self-reported interoception.Scientific reports · 2025Pooled it
- The relationship between mindfulness and objective measures of body awareness: A meta-analysis.Scientific reports · 2019Pooled it
- The Effectiveness of Brief Meditation Assisted with Cardiac Biofeedback on Interoceptive Accuracy, Sensibility and Awareness: A Randomized Controlled Trial.Applied psychophysiology and biofeedback · 2026Trial
- Trial
- Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal.Cell reports. Medicine · 2023Trial
- The impact of a brief mindfulness training on interoception: A randomized controlled trial.PloS one · 2022Trial
- Minding the Body: A Meta-analysis of the Effects of Mindfulness Meditation Training on Self-reported Interoception.Research square · 2025Article
- Limited Validity of Breath-Counting as a Measure of Mindfulness in Ruminative Adolescents.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- Having the Heart to Exercise Control: Cardiac Interoception Influences Self-Paced Exercise Regulation.European journal of sport science · 2025Article
- Meditation expertise influences response bias and prestimulus alpha activity in the somatosensory signal detection task.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- Mindfulness, cognition, and long-term meditators: Toward a science of advanced meditation.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Modulation of Posterior Default Mode Network Activity During Interoceptive Attention and Relation to Mindfulness.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2024Article
- Sensing, feeling and regulating: investigating the association of focal brain damage with voluntary respiratory and motor control.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Attention to cardiac sensations enhances the heartbeat-evoked potential during exhalation.iScience · 2024Article
- Mindfulness Affects the Boundaries of Bodily Self-Representation: The Effect of Focused-Attention Meditation in Fading the Boundary of Peripersonal Space.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Arousal coherence, uncertainty, and well-being: an active inference account.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2024Review
- Interoceptive ability moderates the effect of physiological reactivity on social judgment.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2023Article
- The inside of me: interoceptive constraints on the concept of self in neuroscience and clinical psychology.Psychological research · 2022Review
- Mindfulness, Interoception, and the Body.Brain sciences · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Meditation is commonly assumed to be associated with enhanced interoceptive accuracy. We previously found that experienced meditators did not exhibit a greater ability than nonmeditators to detect heartbeat sensations at rest, despite the meditators' reported subjective ratings of higher accuracy and lower difficulty. Here, attempting to overcome previous methodological limitations, we assessed interoceptive awareness of heartbeat and breathing sensations across physiological arousal levels using infusions of isoproterenol, a beta-adrenergic agonist similar to adrenaline. We hypothesized that meditators would display greater interoceptive awareness than nonmeditators, as evidenced by higher interoceptive detection rates, increased interoceptive accuracy, and differences in localization of heartbeat sensations. We studied 15 meditators and 15 nonmeditators, individually matched on age, gender, and body mass index, using randomized, double-blinded, and placebo-controlled bolus infusions of isoproterenol. Participants reported their experience of heartbeat and breathing sensations using a dial during infusions and the location of heartbeat sensations on a two-dimensional manikin afterward. There was no evidence of higher detection rates or increased accuracy across any dose, although meditators showed a tendency to report cardiorespiratory sensation changes sooner at higher doses. Relative to nonmeditators, meditators exhibited prominent geographical differences in heartbeat localization, disproportionally reporting sensations throughout central regions of the chest, abdomen, neck, back, and head. To further assess indications of potential differences in cardiac interoceptive accuracy between meditators and nonmeditators, we conducted a meta-analysis including 724 participants and found little evidence for such differences. We conclude that the practice of meditation is not associated with improved cardiac interoceptive awareness.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.