Imagining Pain in Your Body Can Make You Feel Less Connected to It

A brand new study published in Frontiers in Psychology has found that imagining your body in pain, even when it’s only a virtual one, could make you’re feeling less connected to it. Researchers discovered that when people were told to think about a virtual body as their very own and picture it experiencing abdominal pain, their sense of ownership over that body weakened.

Understanding Body Ownership

The study explored a psychological phenomenon often called body ownership – the basic sense that your body is yours. This feeling isn’t only essential for self-awareness but in addition helps you react to danger and interact together with your environment. In individuals with conditions like depersonalization, this sense can break down.

Simulating Body Ownership

To understand the study, it helps to know a bit in regards to the concept of body ownership and the way scientists simulate it. In experiments just like the rubber hand illusion or the full-body illusion, individuals are tricked into feeling that an object – equivalent to a fake hand or a virtual avatar – is definitely a part of their body. This normally involves synchronized visual and touch stimulation. For example, when someone sees a virtual back being stroked similtaneously their very own back is touched in the identical way, their brain can begin to treat that virtual body as their very own.

The Study

The researchers recruited 32 male participants, ultimately including 27 of their final evaluation after excluding some attributable to technical issues. All participants were healthy and wore a virtual reality headset that allowed them to see a 3D avatar from behind. During the experiment, participants experienced synchronized and unsynchronized stroking of their backs while watching a virtual body being stroked in the identical way. Sometimes, they were instructed to think about the avatar as only a body. Other times, they were told to assume it as their very own body, either in a neutral state or while experiencing abdominal pain.

Results

The results were striking. When participants were told to assume the virtual body in pain, their physical reactions to the fear stimulus were significantly weaker than once they imagined the body as being in a neutral state. This suggested that they didn’t feel as connected to the virtual body within the pain condition. The questionnaire responses, that are more subjective, didn’t show the identical effect – possibly because participants were influenced by the instructions to treat the body as their very own, no matter how they really felt.

Conclusion

The study’s findings offer a invaluable insight: when people imagine their body in a negative state, their brain may draw back from fully “owning” it – even when that body is barely virtual. This sheds light on how mental interpretations and emotional states shape our connection to our own body, which could assist in understanding conditions like depersonalization.

Limitations

However, the researchers acknowledge some limitations. It’s not clear whether the reduced sense of ownership got here specifically from the negative interpretation or from the mismatch between the true body (not in pain) and the imagined one (in pain). It’s possible that the brain resisted owning the virtual body just because it didn’t match the participants’ actual physical state.

Future Research

Further research is required to find out whether the inhibitory effect is specifically attributable to the negative interpretation or to differences between actual and virtual body states. Nevertheless, the findings provide a invaluable place to begin for exploring how mental interpretations and emotional states shape our connection to our own body.