Overview

A persistent, LLM-maintained research wiki on interoception — the sense of the internal physiological condition of the body — and its role in emotion, selfhood, and clinical/wellbeing applications.

How to read this wiki

• Studies are one page per source (immutable raw sources live in raw/).
• Concepts, methods, debates, researchers, applications, and synthesis are consolidated cross-source pages.
• Everything is cross-linked with double-bracket wikilinks. Contradictions between sources are flagged explicitly rather than smoothed over.
• On debate pages, the my-take fields are reserved for the human curator.

Current scope

As of 2026-07-05 the wiki covers Week 2: Classic Theories of Emotion — three sources spanning the classic peripheralist/centralist/cognitive theories and their modern predictive-coding successor.

The organizing question of the current material

All three sources pivot on one hinge: how much of emotion is bodily signal, and how much is interpretation of it?

• William James (1884) — the bodily change comes first; the perception of it IS the emotion. Requires that basic emotions have distinct visceral signatures (autonomic-specificity).
• Walter Cannon — arousal is undifferentiated and central; feelings and bodily responses are independent outputs (Cannon–Bard).
• Schachter & Singer (1962) — arousal is undifferentiated raw material; cognitive appraisal supplies the emotional label (cognitive-appraisal, two-factor theory).
• Anil Seth (2013) — the dichotomy dissolves: emotion is interoceptive-inference, where “signal” (prediction error) and “interpretation” (top-down prediction) are two directions of one predictive hierarchy.

Two threads run through the material:

1. Friedman (2010) argues the empirical record vindicates James: basic emotions do have discriminable autonomic patterns. → debate: autonomic-specificity-of-emotion.
2. Dror (2017) argues, historically, that the “undifferentiated arousal” premise everyone debates was a social-psychological import, not a physiological finding. → debate: origins-of-two-factor-theory.
3. Seth (2013) reframes the whole lineage under predictive coding. → debate: feedforward-vs-predictive-interoception.

Entry points

• Start with the index for the full catalog.
• For the theoretical spine: interoception → interoceptive-inference → predictive-coding.
• For the historical spine: william-james → walter-cannon → stanley-schachter → anil-seth.