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

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Chapter 4
Hlushchuk, Williams, Schürmann, Kalso, and Hari, 2007). The implications of this
distinction for behaviour are that other-oriented empathy may promote altruistic
motivations to help another person, while self-orientated empathy may lead to egoistic
motivations to reduce the personal distress felt by the observer and ultimately
counteract positive empathic behaviours (e.g. helping behaviour; Batson, 1991;
Eisenberg, 2000).
This study aimed to investigate this, by contrasting mirror-touch synaesthetes
with age and gender matched non-synaesthetes on the EQ and an additional measure
of empathy - the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI; Davis, 1980). The IRI contains
a component relating to ‘personal distress’ that is regarded as being self-oriented
emotional reactivity and so is able to clarify if heightened emotional reactivity in
mirror-touch synaesthetes is other rather than self-oriented. In addition, the
relationship between individual differences in emotional reactivity (in both the
synaesthetes and controls) and personality traits were investigated using the ‘Big Five
Inventory (BFI; John, Donahue, and Kentle, 1991). If emotional reactivity is self-
oriented then a correlation with the neuroticism (or emotional stability) trait is
expected, but not if it is other-oriented. A previous study found no relationship
between empathy and emotional stability, but it did not divide empathy into
component factors (Del Barrio, Aluja, and Garcia, 2004), thus my study is the first to
consider the importance of personality on different facets of empathy as indexed by
the EQ and IRI.
4.3.1 Methods
Participants
In the first part of the study, sixteen mirror-touch synaesthetes (mean age ±
s.e.m = 35.5 ± 3.58 years) and sixteen age and gender matched non-synaesthete