A person’s attitude toward his or her self is mirrored in facets of their self-experience. How the body feels—its size, girth, flexibility, strength—and appears contribute to how people see themselves and how they relate to others. The perception of body sensations plays a crucial role in human behavior (to state the obvious). Interoception gives us our sense of being embodied. These feelings are tied to the internal, homeodynamic processes that maintain survival and well-being. They create mood states, shape emotional responses, and influence thinking. The ability to regulate emotions is essential for mental and physical health. Self-regulation is a function of the accurate perception of bodily states (Fustös et al., 2012). Personality patterns reflect this ability.
Body awareness also contributes to body image. People who are high in interoceptive accuracy are less susceptible to objectifying their own bodies. Conversely, persons low in body awareness are more dissatisfied with their bodies (Zamariola et al., 2017). Body image, in turn, influences personality and behavior (Herbert & Pollatos, 2012). Body awareness is related to the personality traits of openness to experience and conscientiousness (Ferentzi et al., 2017) while positive body image is related to extraversion, openness to experience, and conscientiousness (Allen & Walter, 2016; Allen & Celestino, 2018).
Body Awareness and Personality Defenses
There is great individual variation in the attention devoted to one’s own body. Relationships have been demonstrated that diversely involve total body awareness, broad spatial dimensions of the body such as right-left and front-back sides along with specific organs like the face, mouth, eyes, heart, stomach, etc. Some persons are intensely concerned with their own body sensations; and at the opposite extreme are others who have little such awareness. The more aware a man is of his body the more he focuses attention upon his stomach, gut. mouth, and related accessory sectors. The attention patterns may indicate unconscious readiness to act out physically or conversely unconscious self-inhibition to hold one’s self back.
Body-ego defenses come from childhood responses to trauma, shame, and other disturbing bodily experiences. Parental influences are also crucial. A person’s sexual behaviors may stem from parental attitudes toward the body; e.g., the lower half “down there” is “bad.” Second, given that the body is the most constant, closest, immediate, and inescapable experience a person has then this maximizes the likelihood that it will be the source of ego concerns. It becomes, as Freud theorized, the screen upon which a person projects their most salient concerns. Body attitudes are related to personality traits. Prominent examples are body size in that smaller persons can be more aggressive and insecure. Those with higher body awareness can be more self-centered and narcissistic. Those who are more aware of the backs of their bodies tend to display Freud’s “anal” characteristics of obsessive-compulsiveness. They are driven to be more orderly, fastidious, and conscientious (Fisher, 1966).
Body Awareness and Personality Disorders
Antisocial Personality
See my blog-lecture entitled “The Somatic Emptiness of the Psychopathic Personality”
Anxiety and Depressive Disorders
The dimensions of interoception may have separate effects on depressed mood and anxiety in people with hypertension. Lower levels of interoceptive sensibility are related to more depressed mood and anxiety. This is in contrast to interoceptive accuracy which is not related these mental health symptoms. Depressed and anxious people have impaired perceptions about their bodily feelings rather than a problem of what they are actually feeling (Solano-López & Moore, 2019).
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)
Forkmann et al. (2016) revealed a severe pattern of disturbed neurophysiological processing, including difficulties in focusing on body sensations and regulating emotions. It has also been found that persons with BPD experience greater “body plasticity” than others which points to a neurological dysfunction in the sense of body ownership (Bekrater-Bodman et al., 2016). Plus, those with BPD are less likely to be sensitive to inner body signals and this may be a function of inhibited autonomic response. Research on interoceptive accuracy in BPD shows that patients have either an intact or restricted access to their inner sensations. One study showed that subjects with BPD and low body awareness experienced more hypoalgesia than others (Ginzburg et al., 2018). It might be that those with BPD have a heightened attentional bias towards external cues which they use to guide behavior—that is, they are more externally focused—together with less awareness of inner sensations. This latter characteristic may be the result of pervasive invalidation of their sensations and feelings in childhood (Back & Bertsch, 2020). In short, BPD persons have less experiential connection with their bodies than others. This allows them to more easily dissociate to avoid unpleasant emotional experiences or traumatic memories (Schmitz et al., 2021).
Paranoid Personality
Those with persecutory symptoms tend to have low self-esteem coupled with the bias of blaming others for negative events. This low esteem is linked to poor body image and appearance concerns. They are sensitive about their weight, clothing, skin quality, and general appearance. They feel they are viewed negatively by others around them because of their appearance defects and hopeless and helpless about correcting them. Body image dissatisfaction increases feelings of vulnerability and self-consciousness (Marshall, Freeman, & Waite, 2020).
At Its Simplest
The experience of the body—the body schema as it is known—leads to attitudes about the body—or what is called body image—and both of these are related to personality formation. The process begins with awareness. Healthy individuals with good interoceptive sensitivity are in touch with their bodies and emotions and have healthy body images. The opposite may be said for those with less body awareness as seen in disturbed personality functioning. Further, body attitudes shape the personality defenses a person will unconsciously use when feeling anxious or threatened in some way. The earliest studies of body awareness discovered that it was not a homogenous experience, but that certain areas of the body—right/left sides, front/back, upper/lower halves—vary in the amount of attention given to them at any one time. The different degrees of awareness may indicate a readiness to defend by striking out or to defend by withdrawing and avoiding. These patterns most likely are a product of childhood experiences—both positive and negative—and parental reinforcement. The child’s body is very much alive in the adult body. It may lie in the shadows of the past, but it never ever fully fades away.
Paul Shane, Ph.D., LMT
Director, Academic Content
_________________________
References
Allen, M. & Celestino, S. (2018). Body image mediates an association between personality and mental health. Australian Journal of Psychology 70, p. 179-185.
Back, S. & Bertsch, K. (2020). Interoceptive processing in borderline personality pathology: A review on neurophysiological mechanisms. Current Behavioral Neuroscience Reports 7, p. 232–238.
Bekrater-Bodmann, Chung, B., Foel, J., Gescher, D., Bohus, M., & Flor, H. (2021). Body plasticity in borderline personality disorder: A link to dissociation. Comprehensive Psychiatry 69, DOI: 10.1016/j.comppsych.2016.05.002
Frentzi, E., Köteles, F., Csala, B., Drew, R., Tihanyi, B., Pulay-Kottlár, G., & Doering, B. (2017). What makes sense in our body? Personality and sensory correlates of body awareness and somatosensory amplification. Personality and Individual Differences 104, p. 75-81.
Fisher, S. (1966). Body attention patterns and personality defenses. Psychological Monographs 80(9), p. 1-31.
Forkmann, T., Scherer, A., Meessen, J., Michal, M., Schächinger, H., Vögele, C., & Schulz, A. (2016). Making sense of what you sense: Disentangling interoceptive awareness, sensibility and accuracy. International Journal of Psychophysiology 109, p. 71–80.
Fustös, J., Gramann, K., Herbert, B., & Pollatos, O. (2012). On the embodiment of emotion regulation: Interoceptive awareness facilitates reappraisal. SCAN 8, p. 911-917.
Ginzburg, K., Biran, I., Goor-Aryeh, I., Tsur, N., &Defrin, R. (2018). Pain perception and body awareness among individuals with borderline personality disorder. Journal of Personality Disorder 32(5), p. 618-635.
Herbert, B. & Pollatos, O. (2012). The body in the mind: On the relationship between interoception and embodiment. Topics in Cognitive Science 4, p. 692-704.
Marshall, E., Freeman, D., & Waite, F. (2020). The experience of body image concerns in patients with persecutory delusions: ‘People don’t want to sit next to me.’ Psychology and Psychotherapy 93(3), p. 639-655.
Schmitz, M., Bertsch, K., Löffler, A., Steinmann, S., Herpertz, S., & Bekrater-Bodmann, R. (2021). Body connection mediates the relationship between traumatic childhood experiences and impaired emotion regulation in borderline personality disorder. Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation 8(1), DOI: 10.1186/s40479-021-00157-7
Zamariola, G., Cardini, F., Mian, E., & Serino, A. (2017). Can you feel the body that you see? On the relationship between interoceptive accuracy and body image. Body Image 20, p. 130-136.