The influence of skin colour on the experience of ownership in the rubber hand illusion

Lira, Marília; Egito, Júlia Horta Tabosa do; Dall'Agnol, Patricia Aparecida; Amodio, David M.; Gonçalves, Óscar F.; Boggio, Paulo S.

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-16137-3

Cited by 37 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Illusory ownership among White participants over a Black or White rubber hand [ 22 , 40 , 41 ] and a Black or White virtual body [ 20 , 23 , 24 ] has been replicated a number of times, and no differences were found between the subjective illusion of ownership between the virtual Black and White conditions. The same was found in [ 42 ] except that the time to onset of the illusion was longer for the Black rubber hand than the White. The Neutral and Positive conditions of our experiment provide a further replication of these findings.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

Virtual body ownership and its consequences for implicit racial bias are dependent on social context

et al. 2020

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When people hold implicit biases against a group they typically engage in discriminatory behaviour against group members. In the context of the implicit racial bias of ‘White' against ‘Black' people, it has been shown several times that implicit bias is reduced after a short exposure of embodiment in a dark-skinned body in virtual reality. Embodiment usually leads to the illusion of ownership over the virtual body, irrespective of its skin colour. Previous studies have been carried out in virtual scenarios that are affectively neutral or positive. Here, we show that when the scenario is affectively negative the illusion of body ownership of White participants over a White body is lessened, and implicit bias is higher for White participants in a Black virtual body. The study was carried out with 92 White female participants, in a between-groups design with two factors: BodyType (their virtual body was White or Black) and a surrounding Crowd was Negative, Neutral or Positive towards the participant. We argue that negative affect prevents the formation of new positive associations with Black and distress leads to disownership of the virtual body. Although virtual reality is often thought of as an ‘empathy machine' our results suggest caution, that this may not be universally the case.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

Virtual body ownership and its consequences for implicit racial bias are dependent on social context

et al. 2020

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“…A textural constraint is that if the rubber hand skin texture looks natural, the RHI is experienced more strongly than if it looks unnatural ( Haans et al, 2008 ) or does not match with the own skin color ( Farmer et al, 2012 ; Lira et al, 2017 ). Lira et al (2017) , for instance, recruited white participants and compared the inducibility of a RHI with a white and with a black rubber hand. What they found was that for the black rubber hand condition, there was a longer RHI induction time, lower SoO level and smaller proprioceptive drift than for the white rubber hand condition ( Lira et al, 2017 ).…”

Section: Sense Of Ownershipmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… Lira et al (2017) , for instance, recruited white participants and compared the inducibility of a RHI with a white and with a black rubber hand. What they found was that for the black rubber hand condition, there was a longer RHI induction time, lower SoO level and smaller proprioceptive drift than for the white rubber hand condition ( Lira et al, 2017 ).…”

Section: Sense Of Ownershipmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Senses of Agency and Ownership: A Review

et al. 2018

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Usually, we do not question that we possess a body and act upon the world. This pre-reflective awareness of being a bodily and agentive self can, however, be disrupted by different clinical conditions. Whereas sense of ownership (SoO) describes the feeling of mineness toward one’s own body parts, feelings or thoughts, sense of agency (SoA) refers to the experience of initiating and controlling an action. Although SoA and SoO naturally coincide, both experiences can also be made in isolation. By using many different experimental paradigms, both experiences have been extensively studied over the last years. This review introduces both concepts, with a special focus also onto their interplay. First, current experimental paradigms, results and neurocognitive theories about both concepts will be presented and then their clinical and therapeutic relevance is discussed.

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“…This might also facilitate the perception of the other person as a whole, including the classification into an in- or out-group member. In fact, in previous studies that investigated sensorimotor processes when the other person’s body parts were seen from a first-person perspective (Farmer et al, 2012; Bufalari et al, 2014), no differences between dark- and light-skinned stimuli were found, at least not on an implicit level (but see Lira et al, 2017 for an exception). At the moment, these interpretations remain largely speculation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…For example, a bigger influence could be expected if we presented a real other person rather than an avatar, or a life-sized avatar rather than a small stimulus on a screen. Furthermore, in the case of the rubber hand illusion, no influence of skin color was found for proprioceptive drift (Farmer et al, 2012); yet with a presumably more sensitive measure (time-till-illusion, see Lira et al, 2017), a difference was evidenced. A further critique could be that the study was designed as an online study.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Putting Yourself in the Skin of In- or Out-Group Members: No Effect of Implicit Biases on Egocentric Mental Transformation

et al. 2019

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Previous studies suggest that visual encoding of ethnicity of in-group/out-group members might influence empathy and sensorimotor sharing. Here, we investigated whether mental perspective taking, presumably a precursor of empathy, is also influenced by in-group/out-group perception and the implicit attitudes toward it. We used an embodied egocentric visual-perspective taking task, the full body rotation task (FBR), in which participants were asked to mentally rotate themselves into the position of dark- or light-skinned bodies. FBR was contrasted to a pure sensorimotor task, the hand laterality task (HLT), in which participants were asked to mentally rotate their hand to the posture of seen light- or dark-skinned hands, which does not require mental simulation of another person’s perspective. We expected the FBR but not the HLT to be influenced by the skin color of the stimuli and by the individual implicit biases toward out-group members. Contrary to this hypothesis, we found that neither skin color nor implicit biases modulated reaction times (RTs) in either task. The data thus suggest that unlike other empathy tasks, skin color does not influence visuospatial perspective taking.

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The influence of skin colour on the experience of ownership in the rubber hand illusion

Cited by 37 publications

References 39 publications

Virtual body ownership and its consequences for implicit racial bias are dependent on social context

Virtual body ownership and its consequences for implicit racial bias are dependent on social context

The Senses of Agency and Ownership: A Review

Putting Yourself in the Skin of In- or Out-Group Members: No Effect of Implicit Biases on Egocentric Mental Transformation

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