#9587. Vicarious pain is an outcome of atypical body ownership: Evidence from the rubber hand illusion and enfacement illusion

September 2026publication date
Proposal available till 14-05-2025
4 total number of authors per manuscript0 $

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Journal’s subject area:
Psychology (all);
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology;
Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology;
Physiology (medical);
Physiology;
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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 asynchronous stroking. Importantly, this occurs only in asynchronous conditions in which the stroking is predictable (alternating) rather than unpredictable (random).
Keywords:
embodiment; enfacement illusion; rubber hand illusion; time perception; Vicarious pain

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