Interoceptive sensibility
How attuned to their own body a person believes they are — whether they think they notice their heartbeat, their breath, the difference between hunger and tiredness. It is captured through questionnaires and reflects belief about one's bodily sensing rather than a tested measure of it, so it can drift apart from how that sensing actually performs.
Subjective self-report of one's own interoceptive ability — how attuned a person believes they are to their internal body states, measured through questionnaire instruments such as the Body Perception Questionnaire (BPQ) and the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA). The construct is what a person thinks their interoception is like, dissociated from how it actually performs on behavioural tasks. One of the three axes of the Garfinkel 2015 distinction.
Etymology§
Sensibility in the older English sense — capacity for fine perception or quick reception of impressions, with the connotation of self-reported sensitivity. The term was chosen to distinguish the construct from accuracy (the objective measure) and awareness (the metacognitive correspondence between the two). Earlier interoception literature treated self-report and behavioural measures as interchangeable; the post-2015 nomenclature is the field correcting that conflation.
Interoceptive sensibility is the dimension most accessible in clinical and contemplative settings — questionnaires that ask whether the person notices their heart racing, whether they sense their breath, whether they distinguish hunger from fatigue. The MAIA, developed by Wolf Mehling and colleagues at UCSF in 2012 (then revised as MAIA-2 in 2018), is the most-used instrument; the BPQ from Stephen Porges's group is the older one. Both produce subscale scores on dimensions like noticing, attention regulation, emotional awareness, self-regulation, and trusting the body's signals.
Sensibility is the dimension most relevant to body-based clinical interventions — yoga, mindfulness-based stress reduction, somatic experiencing, sensorimotor psychotherapy — where the therapeutic move is often to increase reported attunement to the body. The Khalsa Roadmap flags this as both useful and a concern: the constructs measured by self-report are precisely what mindfulness and somatic interventions are designed to change, so improvements on self-report measures after treatment may reflect changed beliefs as much as changed interoception. The metacognitive-correspondence axis is what disambiguates: post-treatment, has self-report shifted toward or away from objective accuracy?
The clinical pull on sensibility as the primary outcome variable runs against the methodological caution. A patient who reports more body attunement after mindfulness training has changed their relationship to the body's signals, but whether the underlying interoception has changed (or whether the patient has merely become more confident in their existing interoception) requires the harder accuracy-and-awareness measurement. Sensibility is the most clinically tractable dimension and the one most vulnerable to self-report inflation; the trio-axis distinction from Garfinkel 2015 is the field's correction.