Awareness of the bodily self in vicarious perception

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 empathic understanding in all of us.

This fellowship will ensure that these research findings are disseminated to academic and public audiences in order to further the field of research, and so that the findings can impact on future decisions in industry. This will be achieved through academic and non-academic publications, and a larger public engagement event, which will reach individuals unfamiliar with the field of research.

Significant findings from the PhD thesis will be followed up in pilot studies investigating bodily self-awareness in vicarious perception. While data from the PhD thesis indicates greater self-reported interoception in a group of mirror-pain synaesthetes compared with controls, it remains to be seen whether this difference will be found on objective measures. A second experiment will use EEG methods to explore whether impairments in self-other distinction shown by individuals with high depersonalisation are seen in mirror-touch and mirror-pain synaesthesia. This research project will facilitate planning and pilot data for a future grant application, which will allow this line of research to be continued.