The current results are supported by evidence that insular cortex, known to be critical for generating interoceptive predictions, is a reliable neural correlate of affective processing (Bernhardt and Singer, 2012, Seth, 2013, Zaki et al., 2012). The findings are also in accordance with recent work showing that alexithymia, a condition characterized by interoceptive atypicalities (Hogeveen et al., 2016, Livingston and Livingston, 2016, Shah et al., 2016a, Shah et al., 2016b), predicted performance on a task requiring emotional understanding but not on a task assessing non-emotional ToM, whereas Autism Spectrum Disorder, which is associated with ToM but not interoceptive deficits, predicted performance on tests of ToM but not emotion understanding (Oakley, Brewer, Bird, & Catmur, 2016). Nonetheless, we suggest that interoceptive training may have a beneficial impact in the real world, where an improved ability to represent the interoceptive/emotional states of oneself and of others is likely to result in more accurate mental state inferences, and benefit emotional understanding more generally.