The purposes of the present study were to explore the relationship between body awareness and negative body attitude, interoceptive body awareness and physical self in women practicing fitness as well as to analyze the determinants of body awareness. The Body Awareness Questionnaire, the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness, the Physical Self-Description Questionnaire and the Body Attitude Test were applied to 43 women practicing fitness and 32 non-fitness practitioners. Bodily self-awareness was connected with greater fitness practitioners’ interoceptive body awareness and greater (...) physical self. Noticing and global esteem predicted body awareness in women practicing fitness. (shrink)

The processing, representation, and perception of bodily signals (interoception) plays an important role for human behavior. Theories of embodied cognition hold that higher cognitive processes operate on perceptual symbols and that concept use involves reactivations of the sensory-motor states that occur during experience with the world. Similarly, activation of interoceptive representations and meta-representations of bodily signals supporting interoceptive awareness are profoundly associated with emotional experience and cognitive functions. This article gives an overview over present findings and models on interoception and (...) mechanisms of embodiment and highlights its relevance for disorders that are suggested to represent a translation deficit of bodily states into subjective feelings and self-awareness. (shrink)