Gastric interoception: Towards an improved understanding of interoceptive processes within and across organ domains in healthy individuals and patients with functional dyspepsia.

Tabea Eimer will work in a multidisciplinary research project, funded by the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO), that examines whether interoception is a general ability that shares neural processing characteristics across multiple organ domains and that predicts affective responses. Moreover, the project will test whether altered interoceptive processing of bodily signals from different organs can explain the heterogeneity of somatic symptoms, especially in patients with functional somatic syndromes (FSS). She will carry out several studies that aim to assess these questions in a laboratory setting, using state-of-the-art methods including psychophysiological, neural (EEG) and behavioral measures next to self-reports and questionnaires. Apart from the acquisition and statistical analysis of the data, she will also be responsible for the scientific reporting of the results in international peer-reviewed journals and at scientific conferences. The conducted line of experimental studies will result in a PhD thesis that will be defended by the end of the research project.