Abstract
A virtual-reality setup was used to investigate the relationship between perceived body ownership and subjective anxiety, as assessed by an anxiety inventory (SA-I). A pilot study confirmed that synchrony between the participant’s real hand movements and the movements of a virtual effector induced perceived ownership illusions. The illusions were comparable for virtual human hands and virtual cat claws, even though the overall acceptance was greater for human hands. In Experiment 1, participants used the virtual effector to collect coins and avoid knives descending on a screen before anxiety was measured. The level of anxiety increased with synchrony and was higher for human hands than for cat claws, but these two effects were independent. Experiment 2 separated effects of coin catching and knife avoiding by means of a between-participant design. The outcome of Experiment 1 was replicated in the knife-avoiding task but not in the coin-catching task, in which anxiety levels were low and not systematically affected by the type of virtual effector. Taken altogether, our findings suggest that subjective anxiety and ownership are strongly related.
Highlights
The rubber hand illusion is the experience of an artificial body part as becoming a real body part
Participants reported a stronger sense of body ownership for the human hand (M = 0.57, SD = 1.21) than for the cat claw (M = -2.02, SD = 1.02), in both synchronous and asynchronous conditions
The synchrony manipulation was successful in inducing the ownership illusion, at least for the human hand
Summary
The rubber hand illusion is the experience of an artificial body part as becoming a real body part. When the real hand and the visible rubber hand were stroked in a synchronous fashion, participants reported to experience the rubber hand as being a part of their body. This method is widely used, with various minor and major variations to induce illusions of body ownership (Ide, 2013; Lloyd, 2007; Tsakiris & Haggard, 2005; Zopf, Savage, & Williams, 2010). Armel & Ramachandran, (2003) repeatedly tapped and stroked participants’ real hidden hand and a rubber hand synchronously (which according to Botvinick and Cohen would induce a sense of ownership for the rubber hand). Brain imaging studies showed that threat to an ‘‘owned’’ rubber hand can induce brain-activity patterns that are commonly associated with anxiety and introspective awareness (in insular and anterior cingulate cortex) and that are obtained if the participant’s real hand is Psychological Research (2016) 80:1020–1029 threatened (Ehrsson, Wiech, Weiskopf, Dolan, & Passingham, 2007)
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