Interoceptive Accuracy, Metacognition, and Interpersonal Trust Perception Across the Adult Lifespan

Older adults tend to miss cues to others’ untrustworthiness and are disproportionally vulnerable to suboptimal social decisions. One overlooked mechanism of age-related change in interpersonal trust decisions is interoception, the perception of one’s own bodily signals. Interoception is important for well-calibrated trust decisions because somatic signals, or “gut-based” affective responses, can help inform who is trustworthy versus ill-intentioned. This study examined how individuals’ interoceptive accuracy and their interoceptive metacognitive ability moderated associations between age and interpersonal trust perceptions. During an in-lab session, 135 participants (aged 18–83) completed an interpersonal trust task and a heartbeat detection (HBD) task to measure their interoceptive accuracy (measured as d’) and interoceptive metacognition (measured as metacognitive sensitivity and metacognitive efficiency). We found that, as age increased, participants were more likely to rate normatively untrustworthy facial stimuli as more trustworthy, and this effect was stronger for those with lower interoceptive accuracy. We also found that among those with high interoceptive metacognition, older participants were more likely to rate normatively untrustworthy stimuli as more trustworthy, and trustworthy stimuli as more untrustworthy. Results from this study suggest bodily cues may provide information about others’ trustworthiness, and at older age, those who do not perceive their own bodily signals accurately are also likely to make errors in interpersonal decisions. As adults develop, better interoceptive metacognition may reflect a tendency to discount affective responses during decision making.