Mirror-touch synaesthesia: the role of shared ... - UCL Discovery

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CHAPTER 4: MIRROR-TOUCH SYNAESTHESIA AND
EMPATHY
Chapter 4
In the preceding chapters I investigated the behavioural correlates and perceptual
consequences of mirror-touch synaesthesia. Here I consider the implications of
mirror-touch synaesthesia for general cognitive processing. Previous fMRI findings
link mirror-touch synaesthesia to heightened activations in the mirror-touch system
(the same neural system activated in non-synaesthetes when observing touch to
others). It has been suggested that components of the mirror-touch system may act to
facilitate processes such as empathy and emotion recognition because they provide
the perceiver with a neurophysiological mechanism to simulate what it would “feel
like” to be in the same situation. To examine this possibility, two experiments were
conducted to investigate the influence of heightened sensorimotor simulation in
mirror-touch synaesthesia on empathy. Experiment 1, ‘Mirror-touch synaesthesia
and empathy’, demonstrates that mirror-touch synaesthesia, but not other variants of
synaesthesia, is linked with heightened empathic abilities for specific components of
empathy. Experiment 2, ‘Empathy and personality’, extends the findings from
experiment 1 by demonstrating that differences in empathy are ‘other’ rather than
‘self’ orientated reactions.
4.1 Introduction
Empathy is a higher order psychological construct and is considered to have
two main strands: (i) cognitive empathy – predicting and understanding another’s
mental state by using cognitive processes (i.e. role / perspective taking), and (ii)
affective empathy – experiencing an appropriate emotional response as a consequence
of another’s state (Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright, 2004; Decety and Jackson, 2004;
Preston and de Waal, 2002). Evolutionary perspectives suggest that there are several
possible systems which mediate this division, including phylogentically early
emotional contagion systems and more recently evolved cognitive perspective taking
mechanisms (De Waal, 2007), with the former thought to play a crucial role in
supporting the ability to empathize emotionally (e.g. I feel sad when I see someone
else sad) and the later considered to be linked to more complex empathic cognitions
including perspective taking and mentalizing.