Increasing self-other bodily overlap increases sensorimotor resonance to others' pain.

ABSTRACT: Empathy for another person's pain and feeling pain oneself seem to be accompanied by similar or shared neural responses. Such shared responses could be achieved by mapping the bodily states of others onto our own bodily representations. We investigated whether sensorimotor neural responses to the pain of others are increased when experimentally reducing perceived bodily distinction between the self and the other. Healthy adult participants watched video clips of the hands of ethnic ingroup or outgroup members being painfully penetrated by a needle syringe or touched by a cotton swab. Manipulating the video presentation to create a visuospatial overlap between the observer's and the target's hand increased the perceived bodily self-attribution of the target's hand. For both ingroup and outg

SUBMITTER: Riecansky I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7012796 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature