How mirror-touch informs theories of synesthesia

Meier, Beat; Lunke, Katrin; Rothen, Nicolas

doi:10.1080/17588928.2015.1057484

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…grapheme-colour), MTS and conscious vicarious pain therefore appear to reflect a heightened example of typical vicarious perception. In this case, as Meier et al[82] argue, conscious vicarious perception may not provide a strong model for synaesthesia generally, but instead inform models of vicarious perception and social cognition in typical adults, as discussed above.In summary, the current study demonstrates increased depersonalization and interoceptive sensibility, and decreased externally oriented thinking, in Sensory-Localized and Affective-Generalized conscious vicarious pain responders compared with non-responders. The results indicate a role for bodily self-awareness in modulating vicarious perception of pain, and highlight the need for theoretical accounts of vicarious perception to take a broader focus, beyond sensorimotor mirroring.…”

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confidence: 96%

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Atypical bodily self-awareness in vicarious pain responders

Bowling

Botan

Santiesteban

et al. 2019

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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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. However, 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. Increased self-reported depersonalization and interoceptive sensibility was found for conscious vicarious pain responders compared with non-responders, in addition to more internally oriented thinking (associated with lower alexithymia). There were no significant differences in trait anxiety. Results indicate that maintaining a stable sense of the bodily self may be important for vicarious perception of pain, and that vicarious perception might also be enhanced by attention towards internal bodily states. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Bridging senses: novel insights from synaesthesia’.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

mentioning

confidence: 96%

Atypical bodily self-awareness in vicarious pain responders

Bowling

Botan

Santiesteban

et al. 2019

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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“…Those who do tend to report this can be described as having mirror-touch or mirror-pain synaesthesia because vision is triggering a somatosensory experience (Fitzgibbon et al, 2012), and this tendency is greater in people who also have more conventional types of synaesthesia (Ward, 2019). However, for present purposes nothing hinges on whether this is helpful or accurate to describe as a type of synaesthesia (Meier, Lunke, & Rothen, 2015). All that matters is whether it is a stable and meaningful individual difference.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

The Vicarious Experiences Questionnaire(s): Online Tools for Measuring Mirror-Touch and Vicarious Pain

Ward¹,

Li²

2022

Preprint

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Vicarious experiences refer to shared feelings (e.g., emotion contagion) and sensations (e.g., pain or touch) that occur when an observer sees (or otherwise infers) that another person is in that state. There may be stable trait-level individual differences in this tendency. Here we report a dataset from two previously developed measures for vicarious touch and pain (Mirror-touch Questionnaire and Vicarious Pain Questionnaire), which we collectively term the Vicarious Experiences Questionnaire. As well as making this dataset publicly available, we also include a novel analysis of the data, together with tools for enabling other researchers to collect and analyse this data (video stimuli, an importable Qualtrics survey, and Excel sheets for classifying participants). We show that a subset of the ‘normal’ population experience reportable sensations of touch and pain when seeing it in others and demonstrate how they may be classified into several different groups. With regards to vicarious pain, we report separate ‘sensory-localised’ and ‘affective-general’ groups (alongside non-responders) and consider the extent to which such differences are categorical or dimensional. For vicarious touch (or mirror-touch), we show that this tends to be found in people with a more extreme ‘sensory-localised’ profile for vicarious pain. The affective-general group has a stronger gender bias (F>M) that is weaker in the sensory-localised group and absent for mirror-touch.

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“…For instance, the mapping between inducing stimulus and synaesthetic experience is nonarbitrary in MTS (e.g., observed touch to face triggers felt touch to the face) but is far more idiosyncratic in grapheme-colour (Rothen & Meier, 2013). Also, whereas MTS has been explained in terms of a difficulty in attributing experiences to self versus other (Ward & Banissy, 2015), it is unclear how this explanation relates to other kinds of synaesthesia (Meier, Lunke, & Rothen, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Co-occurrence of Mirror-Touch With Other Types of Synaesthesia

Ward

2019

Perception

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People with mirror-touch synaesthesia report tactile experiences on their body when seeing other people touched. Although this has been referred to as a type of synaesthesia, it is unknown whether it co-occurs with more commonly accepted variants of synaesthesia (e.g. grapheme-colour). If it did, then this would imply a common or partly shared causal mechanism. To this end, a sample of verified grapheme-colour synaesthetes (N=80) were given a recently developed online diagnostic measure of mirror-touch. The prevalence in this group (~20%) was around 10 times higher than the general population. Moreover, performance on this measure was significantly related to the selfreport of mirror-touch given, on average, three years earlier.

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How mirror-touch informs theories of synesthesia

Cited by 4 publications

References 17 publications

Atypical bodily self-awareness in vicarious pain responders

Atypical bodily self-awareness in vicarious pain responders

The Vicarious Experiences Questionnaire(s): Online Tools for Measuring Mirror-Touch and Vicarious Pain

The Co-occurrence of Mirror-Touch With Other Types of Synaesthesia

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