Figure 1 Interoception, trait anxiety, and the gut microbiome: A cognitive and physiological model. The model shows the emergence of contextual anxiety associations through overgeneralization. In this hypothesis, even if one of the lower sensory modalities (E1, E2, or E3) have an adverse or recurrent component (Y), this eventually affects the concept (prior X), which can lead to a negative association of the whole concept and its individual elements [8,11]. This process is driven by bi-directional prediction error minimization, where prediction errors convey information of the sensory environment (E), and the prior (X) the experiential data of predicted cause and neural response [9,12].