I feel your fear: shared touch between faces facilitates recognition of fearful facial expressions

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DOI

Embodied simulation accounts of emotion recognition claim that we vicariously activate somatosensory representations to simulate, and eventually understand, how others feel. Interestingly, mirror-touch synesthetes, who experience touch when observing others being touched, show both enhanced somatosensory simulation and superior recognition of emotional facial expressions. We employed synchronous visuotactile stimulation to experimentally induce a similar experience of "mirror touch" in nonsynesthetic participants. Seeing someone else's face being touched at the same time as one's own face results in the "enfacement illusion," which has been previously shown to blur self-other boundaries. We demonstrate that the enfacement illusion also facilitates emotion recognition, and, importantly, this facilitatory effect is specific to fearful facial expressions. Shared synchronous multisensory experiences may experimentally facilitate somatosensory simulation mechanisms involved in the recognition of fearful emotional expressions.

Keywords

  • Adult, Face, Facial Expression, Fear/physiology, Female, Humans, Illusions/physiology, Neuropsychological Tests, Recognition, Psychology/physiology, Social Perception, Touch Perception/physiology, Visual Perception/physiology, Young Adult
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)7-13
Number of pages7
JournalEmotion
Volume13
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Feb 2013
Externally publishedYes
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