Villegas Martinez, Carolina;
(2025)
Parental interoception: uncovering parents’ capacity to read children’s bodily signals via subjective and psychophysiological methods.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
Interoception, the awareness and processing of internal bodily signals, is critical for homeostasis and emotional functioning. Its developmental mechanisms remain unknown, although theories suggest parent-child interactions play a key role. Direct evidence and appropriate instruments to investigate this are lacking. Therefore, this thesis developed and employed novel subjective and objective measures of parental interoception to investigate parents’ ability to identify and respond to their children’s interoceptive states, and how this relates to individual interoception, psychosocial traits, and child outcomes. The Parental Interoception Questionnaire (PIQ) was created and validated in three phases (Chapter 2): item development, scale development, and scale evaluation. Across two samples (N1 = 601, 46% female; N2 = 511, 50% female) analyses yielded a 24-item questionnaire comprising five factors. PIQ scores correlated significantly with emotion regulation, parental mentalising, and child behaviours, supporting its construct validity. Moreover, the Child Body Reading (CBR) task, was designed to assess adults’ (N = 65, 69% female) and parents’ (N = 57, 74% female) ability to discriminate children’s cardiac signals (Chapters 3 and 4). Both groups performed above chance, indicating that adults can discriminate between the cardiac states of children. Overestimation of the heart rate, emotion regulation difficulties, stress, and anxiety related to better performance, suggesting that greater accuracy might not always be adaptive. Both subjective and objective measures of parental interoception were linked to child outcomes, including emotional lability and behavioural problems. This thesis introduces the first tools to explicitly assess parents’ ability to “read” their children’s interoceptive signals and states, providing initial evidence for parental interoception as a multidimensional construct. The findings represent an important step toward understanding how parents read children’s bodily states and support self-regulation development and also help identify individual differences in these processes.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Parental interoception: uncovering parents’ capacity to read children’s bodily signals via subjective and psychophysiological methods |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10217229 |
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