Bodily pleasure matters: velocity of touch modulates body ownership during the rubber hand illusion
Open Access
- 1 January 2013
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Frontiers Media SA in Frontiers in Psychology
- Vol. 4, 703
- https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00703
Abstract
The sense of body ownership represents a fundamental aspect of our self-consciousness. Influential experimental paradigms, such as the rubber hand illusion (RHI), in which a seen rubber hand is experienced as part of one’s body when one’s own unseen hand receives congruent tactile stimulation, have extensively examined the role of exteroceptive, multisensory integration on body ownership. However, remarkably, despite the more general current interest in the nature and role of interoception in emotion and consciousness, no study has investigated how the illusion may be affected by interoceptive bodily signals, such as affective touch. Here, we recruited 52 healthy, adult participants and we investigated for the first time, whether applying slow velocity, light tactile stimuli, known to elicit interoceptive feelings of pleasantness, would influence the illusion more than faster, emotionally-neutral, tactile stimuli. We also examined whether seeing another person’s hand versus a rubber hand would reduce the illusion in slow versus fast stroking conditions, as interoceptive signals are used to represent one’s own body from within and it is unclear how they would be integrated with visual signals from another person’s hand. We found that slow velocity touch was perceived as more pleasant and it produced higher levels of subjective embodiment during the RHI compared with fast touch. Moreover, this effect applied irrespective of whether the seen hand was a rubber or a confederate’s hand. These findings provide support for the idea that affective touch, and more generally interoception, may have a unique contribution to the sense of body ownership, and by implication to our embodied psychological “self”.Keywords
This publication has 33 references indexed in Scilit:
- The perceptual and neuronal stability of the rubber hand illusion across contexts and over timeBrain Research, 2012
- Implicit awareness in anosognosia for hemiplegia: unconscious interference without conscious re-representationBrain, 2010
- Somatotopic Organization of Gentle Touch Processing in the Posterior Insular CortexJournal of Neuroscience, 2009
- How do you feel — now? The anterior insula and human awarenessNature Reviews Neuroscience, 2009
- The rubber hand illusion: Sensitivity and reference frame for body ownershipConsciousness and Cognition, 2007
- Neural systems supporting interoceptive awarenessNature Neuroscience, 2004
- Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the bodyCurrent Opinion in Neurobiology, 2003
- How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the bodyNature Reviews Neuroscience, 2002
- Philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive scienceTrends in Cognitive Sciences, 2000
- Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes seeNature, 1998