Interoceptive ingredients of body ownership: Affective touch and cardiac awareness in the rubber hand illusion

Welcoming back my arm: Affective touch increases body ownership following right hemisphere stroke

“…This study shows for the first time that receiving CT-optimal, affective touch can increase the sense of arm ownership in right-hemisphere stroke patients with DSO. These results are consistent with a growing body of experimental research in healthy subjects, which shows that affective, CT-optimal touch enhances feelings of body-part ownership during multisensory body-ownership illusions (Crucianelli et al, 2013(Crucianelli et al, , 2017Lloyd et al, 2013;van Stralen et al, 2014;Panagiotopoulou et al, 2017;Ponzo et al, 2018). Below we consider the mechanisms by which CT-optimal touch administered by another person increases body ownership.…”

“…Our group was the first to show that applying CT-optimal, affective touch during multisensory illusions of body-part ownership, such as the classic rubber hand illusion (Botvinick and Cohen, 1998), enhances ownership (Crucianelli et al, 2013). Several other studies and groups have now replicated this finding (Lloyd et al, 2013;van Stralen et al, 2014;Crucianelli et al, 2017;Panagiotopoulou et al, 2017;Ponzo et al, 2018) and further investigated different explanations of this effect. First, it appears that affective congruency between different modalities (e.g.…”

“…Affective touch may also increase arm ownership by enhancing interoceptive signals known to play an important role in the "feeling of mineness" (see Craig, 2003;Crucianelli et al, 2017). Interoception informs the mind about how the body is doing in relation to certain homeostatic needs (e.g.…”

“…To examine the effect of touch on limb disownership, we employed a 2 (touch valence: affective vs. neutral) x 2 (touch administrator: self vs. other) repeated-measures design. The valence of touch (affective vs. neutral) was manipulated using two different velocities, such that touch was administered using either a slow, CT-optimal (3cm/s) or fast, CT-suboptimal (18cm/s) touch, which are typically rated as relatively high vs. low in terms of tactile pleasantness and can be reliably distinguished from each other (see Crucianelli et al, 2013Crucianelli et al, , 2017Ponzo et al, 2018). This touch was administered by either the patient (self) or experimenter (other) in a block design (see Procedure), whereby four affective or neutral touch trials were delivered per block (plus one sham trial in which the movement was simulated but no touch was delivered to the forearm).…”

Vestibular modulation of multisensory integration during actual and vicarious tactile stimulation

“…A previous study from our group (Ponzo, Kirsch, Fotopoulou, & Jenkinson, 2018) aimed to clarify these conflicting findings, while assessing how vestibular and interoceptive signals (i.e., feelings about the physiological condition of one's own body; Ceunen, Vlaeyen, & Van Diest, 2016;Craig, 2002) interact to shape body ownership. Recent research indicates that body ownership is modulated by interoceptive signals (Suzuki, Garfinkel, Critchley, & Seth, 2013;Tsakiris, Tajadura-Jimenez, & Costantini, 2011) and can be enhanced by applying gentle touch at slow velocities that activate specialized nerve fibers (C-tactile [CT] afferents), which provide interoceptive information in the form of tactile pleasure (Crucianelli, Krahé, Jenkinson, & Fotopoulou, 2018;Crucianelli, Metcalf, Fotopoulou, & Jenkinson, 2013;Lloyd, Gillis, Lewis, Farrell, & Morrison, 2013;Loken, Wessberg, Morrison, McGlone, & Olausson, 2009;van Stralen et al, 2014). In our previous study, GVS was administered during a RHI procedure using slow affective, CT-optimal or fast emotionally neutral, CTsuboptimal touch.…”