Relationship between abnormal interoception and functional symptoms
Research type
Research Study
Full title
An investigation of the relationship between abnormal interoception and functional movement symptoms in functional movement disorder.
IRAS ID
248568
Contact name
Mark John James Edwards
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Joint Research & Enterprise Office St George's, University of London and St George's Healthcar
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 11 months, 31 days
Research summary
Recent work in healthy people has found a link between control of movement and interoception. Interoception is the ability to pick up information accurately about the internal working of the body (e.g. heart beat). Patients with functional movement disorder have an abnormality of interoception and we are interested if this might help explain the abnormality of movement they have. We therefore plan to study interoception and movement control in patients with functional movement disorder and healthy control participants. This study will use EEG (brain wave recordings) and two short tasks. One is a finger tapping task and the other is a classical reaction time task called the Simon task.
In the simple tapping task, participants will be asked to do self-paced tapping over a fixed time period. Their heartbeat will be also monitored. Synchronicity between their tapping and heartbeat will be analysed. In the linked interoception task, we will assess whether the participant can accurately estimate the number of heartbeats that have occurred within a fixed time interval. In the Simon task, participants are asked to respond to a visual cue with a left or right hand button press. Sometimes the cue is “congruent”, i.e the cue is presented on the left of the screen and participants have to press a button with the left hand, and sometimes it is “incongruent”, i.e. the cure is presented on the left of the screen and participants need to respond with a right button press. In this study we will use two types of cue: pictures of faces with neutral expression and pictures of faces with emotional expressions. As emotional face processing relates to interoception we are interested to see how this affects performance on the task in our patients and control participants.
REC name
North West - Liverpool Central Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
19/NW/0117
Date of REC Opinion
4 Mar 2019
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion