Atypical bodily self-awareness in vicarious pain responders 2016-2017

Bowling, Natalie and Botan, Vanessa and Santiesteban, Idalmis and Ward, Jamie and Banissy, Michael (2019). Atypical bodily self-awareness in vicarious pain responders 2016-2017. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-853496

People with mirror-touch or mirror-pain synaesthesia literally feel a sensation of touch or pain on their own body when watching somebody else being touched or in pain. While unconscious vicarious perception occurs in most healthy adults (observed as neural and bodily responses to others' experiences), these types of synaesthesia represent an extreme case of conscious vicarious perception. Mirror-touch and mirror-pain synaesthesia have previously been linked with heightened empathy and social perception abilities, and therefore provide a unique opportunity for insight into the mechanisms underlying social processes in everyone, and provide implications for interventions where there may be impairments in this domain. These individual differences in vicarious perception raise a further question: if we represent the experiences of other people (through changes in brain activity, heart rate, emotion, etc.) as well as our own, then how do we maintain a coherent sense of self? Work conducted during my PhD addressed this problem, with a focus on processes related to awareness of one's own body. This work revealed significantly increased depersonalisation (the sense of detachment from the bodily self) and interoception (awareness of one's own internal bodily states) in mirror-pain synaesthetes compared with controls. The findings have important implications for the role of bodily self-awareness in social interaction in typical adults. For instance, since mirror-touch and mirror-pain synaesthesia are associated with heightened empathy, atypical bodily self-awareness in these individuals implicates embodied processes underlying empathetic understanding in all of us.

Data description (abstract)

Little work has assessed whether trait differences in bodily self-awareness are associated with conscious vicarious pain. Here we addressed this gap by examining individual difference factors related to awareness of the body, in conscious vicarious pain responders. Vicarious perception refers to the ability to co-represent the experiences of others. Prior research has shown considerable inter-individual variability in vicarious perception of pain, with some experiencing conscious sensations of pain on their own body when viewing another person in pain (conscious vicarious perception / mirror-pain synaesthesia). Self-Other Theory proposes that this conscious vicarious perception may result from impairments in self-other distinction and maintaining a coherent sense of bodily self. In support of this, individuals who experience conscious vicarious perception are more susceptible to illusions of body ownership and agency.

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