Interoception and Empathy Impact Perspective Taking

Lukas Heydrich,Olaf Blanke,Jane Elizabeth Aspell,Bruno Herbelin,Larissa Blättler,Francesco Walker

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.599429

Abstract

Adopting the perspective of another person is an important aspect of social cognition and has been shown to depend on multisensory signals from one’s own body. Recent work suggests that interoceptive signals not only contribute to own-body perception and self-consciousness, but also to empathy. Here we investigated if social cognition – in particular adopting the perspective of another person – can be altered by a systematic manipulation of interoceptive cues and further, if this effect depends on empathic ability. The own-body transformation task (OBT) – wherein participants are instructed to imagine taking the perspective and position of a virtual body presented on a computer screen – offers an effective way to measure reaction time differences linked to the mental effort of taking an other’s perspective. Here, we adapted the OBT with the flashing of a silhouette surrounding the virtual body, either synchronously or asynchronously with the timing of participants’ heartbeats. We evaluated the impact of this cardio-visual synchrony on reaction times and accuracy rates in the OBT. Empathy was assessed with the empathy quotient (EQ) questionnaire. Based on previous work using the cardio-visual paradigm, we predicted that synchronous (vs. asynchronous) cardio-visual stimulation would increase self-identification with the virtual body and facilitate participants’ ability to adopt the virtual body’s perspective, thereby enhancing performance on the task, particularly in participants with higher empathy scores. We report that participants with high empathy showed significantly better performance during the OBT task during synchronous versus asynchronous cardio-visual stimulation. Moreover, we found a significant positive correlation between empathic ability and the synchrony effect (the difference in reaction times between the asynchronous and synchronous conditions). We conclude that synchronous cardio-visual stimulation between the participant’s body and a virtual body during an OBT task makes it easier to adopt the virtual body’s perspective, presumably based on multisensory integration processes. However, this effect depended on empathic ability, suggesting that empathy, interoception and social perspective taking are inherently linked.

Highlights

Empathy is characterized as the ability to be sensitive to, to understand, and to experience the emotions of others (Ochsner et al, 2008; Singer et al, 2009; Reniers et al, 2011), requiring both affective/emotional and cognitive processes
We assessed the own-body transformation task (OBT) effect and whether seeing a virtual body flashing synchronously or asynchronously with respect to the heartbeat as well as empathic ability had an influence on reaction times during the OBT task
We investigated whether performance on a mental OBT task would be modulated by online cardio-visual stimulation that has previously been shown to induce illusory changes in self-identification with a virtual body

Summary

Introduction

Empathy is characterized as the ability to be sensitive to, to understand, and to experience the emotions of others (Ochsner et al, 2008; Singer et al, 2009; Reniers et al, 2011), requiring both affective/emotional and cognitive processes. Given that some authors have argued that emotion is an inherently embodied experience (Damasio, 2000), it has been suggested that individual differences in empathy might be linked to differences in the sensitivity to internal bodily signals (interoception). Neuroimaging studies show that the insula, a primary interoceptive brain region, is activated during the subjective awareness of feelings, including empathy (Ochsner et al, 2008; Craig, 2009; Singer et al, 2009; Zaki et al, 2012; Ernst et al, 2013), suggesting that learned associations between interoceptive signals and emotions observed in others may contribute to empathy (Bird and Viding, 2014; Quattrocki and Friston, 2014)

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