Researcher at a glance
- Affiliation: University of Surrey (Department of Psychology)
- Orientation: Health psychology; symptom perception as a psychologically constructed, meaning-laden process rather than a direct read-out of tissue state. Works qualitatively and quantitatively on how affect, cognition, expectation and language turn bodily states into symptoms.
Key contributions
- With Laura Carter, an explicit ‘series of thresholds’ account of how a bodily state becomes a symptom — making explicit the movable criterion that affective/cognitive symptom-perception models leave implicit.
- ‘Interoceptive Crossover’ (Carter & Ogden 2020): individual differences in the extent to which people perceive their emotions and physical symptoms as similar — a candidate mediator of the alexithymia/interoception link and of gut-centred emotion localisation.
- A widely used Health Psychology textbook and a large body of work on symptom perception, eating behaviour, and patient–practitioner communication (mostly outside raw/).
Key papers
Connections
- Debates: Is more interoceptive awareness better?
- Related researchers: Anke Ehlers, Sarah N. Garfinkel, Olivier Desmedt
Health psychologist at the University of Surrey whose work treats symptoms as psychologically constructed — shaped by affect, cognition, expectation, external cues and language — rather than as transparent indicators of underlying pathology. She reaches this wiki through a single first-hand source, Carter & Ogden (2023), the qualitative interview study (with her doctoral student Laura Carter) that gives the wiki its threshold model of how bodily states become symptoms.
The relevance to interoception
Ogden’s tradition (Pennebaker, Leventhal, Van den Bergh) sits upstream of the interoception literature: it studies the same object — the report of a bodily state — but from health psychology rather than from cardiac-perception tasks or predictive-coding theory. That makes her useful to the wiki as an outside arrival at pictures it otherwise carries in expert vocabulary. The threshold account is Schema-guided symptom perception and Interoceptive inference narrated from qualitative interviews; her group’s “Interoceptive Crossover” construct (Carter & Ogden 2020, not in raw/) — how far a person perceives emotions and physical symptoms as similar — is a health-psychology approach to the alexithymia/emotion-differentiation problem the interoception field reaches from the other side.
Held at one remove: only the 2023 paper is in raw/, so her larger programme (the textbook, the eating-behaviour and communication work, the 2020 quantitative Interoceptive Crossover study) is known here by citation. See Anke Ehlers and Olivier Desmedt for the clinical and psychometric neighbours of this symptom-perception thread, and Sarah N. Garfinkel for the dimensional interoception programme it abuts.