Rubber Hand Illusion

Bodily self-awareness plays a crucial role in social interactions and social-emotional functioning (Tskaris, 2007 2010). Research on the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI), a novel paradigm for investigating the sense of body ownership, demonstrates that representations of the self are not rigid schemas but are malleable, altered not only by bodily processes but also by the social context and other dispositional variables (Botvinick, 1998; Tsakiris, 2010). Specifically, it is thought that flexibility of the body schema may play a role in social perspective-taking, enabling one to mentally simulate another’s action. In line with this, recent evidence suggests that individuals high in the trait of empathy are more susceptible to the RHI (Durgin, Evans,

Although Phenomenological Tradition has richly described the characteristics of embodiment, systematic methodologies are still needed to assist in breaking down concepts of the bodily self (Longo, 2008). Neuropsychological studies have described embodiment using concepts of dissociations between the different constituents of body representations (Longo, 2008). For instance, using brain damaged patients with Anosognosia for hemiplegia, Foutopoulou (2008) determined that forward motor planning is dominant over sensory feedback in awareness of actions. It is difficult to study body ownership experimentally as there is no way of producing a condition where the body is absent. Body Ownership can also be confounded by other mental processes, like the Sense of Agency (having control over actions), which cannot be experimentally isolated from the sense of

The RHI is an experimental procedure during which a participant is induced to experience a rubber limb as belonging to their own body as a result of the integration of multisensory information, demonstrating the plasticity of bodily representations (Botvinick, 1998; Tsakiris, 2010). It is typically induced when a seated participant has both hands on the table, one hand hidden from view with a rubber hand placed next to the hidden hand in the same orientation, with the hidden and rubber hand simultaneously stroked by the experimenter using paintbrushes (Botvinick, 1998; Tsakiris, 2010). The illusion is more likely to occur if the rubber hand is aligned with the real hand; is of a similar skin tone and handedness to the real hand and when synchronous brushing of the rubber and real hand occur (Botvinick, 1998; Tsakiris, 2005; Tsakiris,