@lucysta02475610.bsky.social
PhD researcher. Interoception (mostly gastrointestinal), body image/representation, eating disorders, computational approaches (she/her). https://sites.google.com/york.ac.uk/lucy-stafford/about-me
Research builds in the best ways. I presented our RISE interoception intervention 2+ years ago in CO, and Liz Atwood immediately saw the potential for youth. She ran with the idea & led this project adapting RISE for school-based health centers. Now the paper is out! psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...
Maybe of interest: The submission guidelines of Psychological Science now demand an explicit statement on measures taken to reduce the risk of AI-generated responses for all online studies!
www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...
How the brain listens to the body matters.
Our new preprint investigates interoceptive processing in schizophrenia spectrum disorders across phenomenology, behavior, and heartbeat-evoked brain responses. 🧠🫀DOI: doi.org/10.64898/202...
Delighted to share my first paper of 2026 "Interoception and allostatic load after stroke: A scoping review". Available now, open access: doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
It took several late night/early morning meetings, but I’m very happy to see this perspective piece on #Autistic #interoception published. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Our paper on interoceptive rhythms and perception now is published in NeuroImage 🚀📄
@alexgalvezpol.bsky.social already shared a fantastic breakdown of our main findings in the thread below👇🏽
🔗Full OA article: doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
#Interoception #Perception #Neuroscience #ActiveSensing
New job alert 💫 We’re hiring a 3-year postdoc for the NEPTUNE project to study the causal mechanisms of paranoia and social learning.
Work with us on experimental psychopharmacology (THC), social cognition, and psychosis 🧑🔬
Apply here: lnkd.in/gQqnNvjR](my.corehr.com/pls/kclrecru...)
Please RT :)
Last preprint 🎶(of the year).
If vagus nerve stimulation alters motivation by amplifying internal signals, then bodily states should matter. Using milkshake vs. water loads, we show that tVNS-induced changes in Pavlovian bias are dependent on hunger. #neuroskyence 🩺
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
It is hugely fun & we are very lucky to do science for the sake of science. But it is amazing to see work we and many others I admire have done turn into public awareness thanks to excellent science writing.
(see also www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/s...)
New writeup on interoception in Scientific American focusing on its role in mental health:
www.scientificamerican.com/article/inte...
Out now in @ebiomedicine.bsky.social 🚨.
Hunger often affects our mood, but is this a conscious or a subconscious process? Using continuous glucose monitoring, we show that differences in mood are driven by hunger ratings, not just glucose. #neuroskyence 🩺
www.thelancet.com/journals/EBI...
Out now in Translational Psychiatry! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Very excited to introduce InteroMap, a new bodily mapping tool designed to measure how we subjectively experience our bodily sensations, what we call interoceptive phenomenology 🧵👇
What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma.
It's *scientific publishing*.
We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing.
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_...
Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇
It's that time of year when many start thinking about applying for PhDs. If you're applying for a UK PhD position, here is a blog post I wrote a while back that might be helpful
#cognition #psychscisky #neuroskyence #psychjobs
Thank you to @psypost.bsky.social for featuring our @natmentalhealth.nature.com research on stomach–brain communication and worse mental health symptoms
www.psypost.org/scientists-d...
Was also shared on X but with weirdly more hair colour comments 🌈 than the science itself 😅:
x.com/OwenGregoria...
Even after recovery, relapse is heartbreakingly common in anorexia nervosa. Could the answer lie in the gut’s hidden signals? 🧵
Reilly, Brown & Frank link altered taste, touch, vision, and gut sensing to anorexia and bulimia nervosa, highlight knowledge gaps, and proposing neurobiologically-informed strategies for clinical translation. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38730196/
🚨Do you want to join our online seminars?
Next month we have this amazing seminar with Anna and Noa!
Register to join, it’s free 🤓
#somatosensation
#interoception
#sensory
#body
#science
#neuroscience
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
New qualitative paper! A foray into gastric interception. @lucysta02475610.bsky.social ran a LOT of focus groups, across groups with eating disorders, gastric disorders and neither, to understand how people experience the sensations from their GI system. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
In this @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social Spotlight, I describe how a recent paper by @leahbanellis.bsky.social, @brainandstomach.bsky.social, et al. opens new avenues in interoception research, including those focussed on the subjective interpretation of internal signals: www.cell.com/trends/neuro...
🧠 New publication out!
👁️🗨️ 🫀 In this perspective, we draw parallels with anosognosia
for hemiplegia, commonly seen in acute stroke patients, in the attempt to explain anosognosia for the illness in anorexia nervosa, based on recent
computational accounts
www.frontiersin.org/journals/neu...
On Prolific, "we estimate that about 34% of online study participants use LLMs to answer open-ended questions atleast some of the time..."
Seems like a very timely paper for behavioural scientists using online samples: osf.io/preprints/so... ;
We really need more papers on this issue
A roller coaster of a thread for any interoceptive researchers ⬇️
Wow, this is the kind of evidence we need to move ahead in the field. I'll go out on a limb here: I guess it is more about the gut than cardiac and respiratory domains. Huge effort by @leahbanellis.bsky.social @micahgallen.com and the entire team 👏
the tldr of my thread is that, interoceptive sensing at rest has no relationship to mental health symptoms, and we think this is likely because we need to measure interoception during and after arousal, close in time to symptoms, with ecological measures.
The latest from our lab @the-ecg.bsky.social: interoceptive sensing at rest is *not* related to mental health symptoms 🤔 Read our study here 👇
Are interoception and mental health linked? Many assume so, with interoception even described as a psychiatric “p-factor.” But in our latest preprint, we were surprised to find little evidence for such a connection. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 Thread with our reflections on the matter 👇
This leads me to our final point. Interoceptive accuracy is not the construct for emotion or mental health. We think that interoceptive narratives and beliefs, and how interoceptive sensastions change during acute stress and arousal, is so much more important.
Academia may not give you job security, flexibility, or wealth, but it will let you unexpectedly connect to eduroam in foreign cities