Interoception and Empathy Impact Perspective Taking

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.

Keywords: bodily self-consciousness; empathy; illusion; interoception; perspective taking.

FIGURE 1

Stimulus presentation. Stimuli in the OBT task consisted of a schematic virtual body either facing toward (front facing) or away from the participant (back facing). The participants were asked to imagine themselves in the position and orientation of the virtual body displayed on the screen and to indicate which hand (right/left) was marked. Each experimental block consisted of five consecutive repetitions 20 OBT trials that were interleaved with periods of 35 s of seeing the virtual body with a flashing outline either synchronous (Heart Sync condition) or asynchronous (Heart Async condition) with respect to the heartbeat. This resulted in 100 OBT trials per experimental block. Because each experimental block was repeated twice per condition, a total of 400 OBT trials across conditions was recorded.

FIGURE 2

Results. Participants were split into low and high empathy scorers. Reaction times were significantly shorter if the virtual body was presented back-facing as compared to front facing. A significant interaction of synchrony and empathy group and a significant three-way interaction of synchrony, orientation, and empathy group was due to shorter reaction times in the condition in which the virtual body was flashing synchronously as compared to when the virtual body was flashing asynchronously in the high EQ group only.

FIGURE 3

Correlation.