Social Contact Enhances Bodily Self-Awareness

Nesrine Hazem,Morgan Beaurenaut,Nathalie George,Laurence Conty

doi:10.1038/s41598-018-22497-1

Abstract

Human self-awareness is arguably the most important and revealing question of modern sciences. Converging theoretical perspectives link self-awareness and social abilities in human beings. In particular, mutual engagement during social interactions—or social contact—would boost self-awareness. Yet, empirical evidence for this effect is scarce. We recently showed that the perception of eye contact induces enhanced bodily self-awareness. Here, we aimed at extending these findings by testing the influence of social contact in auditory and tactile modalities, in order to demonstrate that social contact enhances bodily self-awareness irrespective of sensory modality. In a first experiment, participants were exposed to hearing their own first name (as compared to another unfamiliar name and noise). In a second experiment, human touch (as compared to brush touch and no-touch) was used as the social contact cue. In both experiments, participants demonstrated more accurate rating of their bodily reactions in response to emotional pictures following the social contact condition—a proxy of bodily self-awareness. Further analyses indicated that the effect of social contact was comparable across tactile, auditory and visual modalities. These results provide the first direct empirical evidence in support of the essential social nature of human self-awareness.

Highlights

In past traditional approaches, cognitive psychologists tended to isolate conscious experience from the social realm
Real life interactions draw on multiple sensory modalities besides the—most studied—visual modality, including audition and touch, which constitute as important channels for social signaling as eye gaze
In order to lay down the social dimension of self-awareness, it is key to demonstrate the influence of social contact on self-awareness across different sensory modalities

Summary

Introduction

Cognitive psychologists tended to isolate conscious experience from the social realm. Clinical studies showed that self-awareness impairments are often associated with difficulties in social signal processing (for example, in autism, in fronto-temporal dementia, and in traumatic brain injury[4]) In this theoretical framework, it is posited that mutual engagement during social interaction—or social contact—provides the infant with awareness of others as ‘attending’ beings, and of him-/her-self as a potential object of that attending[2]. In order to lay down the social dimension of self-awareness, it is key to demonstrate the influence of social contact on self-awareness across different sensory modalities. This was the aim of the present study. We chose to confront participants with objects from the outside world and to ask them to monitor their interoceptive reactions to these objects, as an ecological way of assessing bodily self-awareness

Methods

Results

Conclusion