Relationship Between Interoception and Autistic Traits: A Resting-State Functional Connectivity Study.

Yang et al. (2024) scanned healthy adults while they rested. The team looked at how tightly brain areas that sense heartbeats and stomach rumbles talk to each other.

Each adult also filled out a short quiz about autism traits and tried to count their own heartbeats. The researchers asked: do weaker body-brain links go hand-in-hand with more autism traits?

People whose body-sensing regions were less connected also scored higher on autism traits. They were worse at guessing their own heartbeats.

The weaker the brain link, the poorer the body awareness. This pattern showed up even though no one in the study had an autism diagnosis.

Lotfizadeh et al. (2020) found no heartbeat accuracy gap between diagnosed adults with ASD and typical adults. The new study shows a gap appears when you look inside the brain, not at the task score. Together they hint that body-brain wiring, not heartbeat skill, tracks with autism traits.

Sasson et al. (2018) saw that typical adults with high autism traits ignore voice tone when reading faces. Han-Xue now shows these same adults also have weaker body-brain links. Both papers paint a picture of reduced cross-system talk in people with sub-clinical traits.

Worsham et al. (2015) reported fewer cross-brain EEG links in autistic boys. The 2024 fMRI result mirrors that pattern in typical young adults, stretching the finding across age, method, and diagnosis level.

You can’t scan a client’s brain in clinic, but you can ask, “Can you feel your heartbeat right now?” A shrug may flag weaker body awareness. Pair this with social or flexibility goals: start sessions with quick body checks (pulse, breath) to prime interoceptive input before social skills practice. The study reminds us that traits live on a continuum; mild self-report scores still map to real neural differences, so don’t wait for a diagnosis to add body-awareness training.