Atypical susceptibility to the rubber hand illusion linked to sensory-localised vicarious pain perception.

Abstract

The Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) paradigm has been widely used to investigate the sense of body ownership. People who report experiencing the pain of others are hypothesised to have differences in computing body ownership and, hence, we predicted that they would perform atypically on the RHI. The Vicarious Pain Questionnaire (VPQ), was used to divide participants into three groups: (1) non-responders (people who report no pain when seeing someone else experiencing physical pain), (2) sensory-localised responders (report sensory qualities and a localised feeling of pain) and (3) affective-general responders (report a generalised and emotional feeling of pain). The sensory-localised group, showed susceptibility to the RHI (increased proprioceptive drift) irrespective of whether stimulation was synchronous or asynchronous, whereas the other groups only showed the RHI in the synchronous condition. This is not a general bias to always incorporate the dummy hand as we did not find increased susceptibility in other conditions (seeing touch without feeling touch, or feeling touch without seeing touch), but there was a trend for this group to incorporate the dummy hand when it was stroked with a laser light. Although individual differences in the RHI have been noted previously, this particular pattern is rare. It suggests a greater malleability (i.e. insensitivity to asynchrony) in the conditions in which other bodies influence own-body judgments.