Vicarious pain is an outcome of atypical body ownership: Evidence from the rubber hand illusion and enfacement illusion.

ABSTRACT: Some people report localised pain on their body when seeing other people in pain (sensory-localised vicarious pain responders). In this study, we assess whether this is related to atypical computations of body ownership which, in paradigms such as the rubber hand illusion (RHI), can be conceptualised as a Bayesian inference as to whether multiple sources of sensory information (visual, somatosensory) belong together on a single body (one's own) or are distributed across several bodies (vision = other, somatosensory = self). According to this model, computations of body ownership depend on the degree (and precision) of sensory evidence, rather than synchrony per se. Sensory-localised vicarious pain responders exhibit the RHI following synchronous stroking and-unusually-also after asynchrono

SUBMITTER: Botan V 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8450990 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature