Bodily self consciousness is a blooming field of research where a lot of questions are still unsolved. From a psychological point of view de Vignemont (2011) proposed an agenda of main issues wondering what is the fundamental role of body ownership, what grounds the sense of ownership, how is the sense of ownership related to bodily sensations, action and emotion, and whether it is possible to feel a sense of ownership for any extracorporeal object. In the present thesis I am going to present a progression of seven studies where I tried to characterize how body representation interacts with pain processing, investigating either patients presenting with body representation disorders and healthy people experiencing bodily misperceptions, by means of recording responses from the autonomous nervous system and ratings of pain experience under different conditions of body representation distortion. Taken together the studies presented show three main findings: an anticipatory response to incoming noxious stimuli is recordable when stimuli enter in the peripersonal space; an intact body representation is necessary to properly monitor noxious stimuli approaching to our own body; when the sense of ownership is transferred to an external object or a virtual body, a visual treat to that external object elicits anticipatory responses akin to those elicited by a menace directed to our own body. The present set of studies provide novel experimental evidence showing the critical influence of body representation for the mapping of sensory experience, in particular pain processing, and how the sense of ownership critically governs this interaction. Overall, the key contribution of the present work is to provide converging data, gathered from different models ranging from the study of pathological populations to the assessment of neurologically intact individuals by means of experimental manipulations, about the role of body representation for the efficient and safe interaction with the world around us, by correctly anticipating potentially dangerous incoming stimuli.
(2014). Body representation shapes the responses to threatening stimuli. (Tesi di dottorato, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, 2014).
Body representation shapes the responses to threatening stimuli
ROMANO, DANIELE LUIGI
2014
Abstract
Bodily self consciousness is a blooming field of research where a lot of questions are still unsolved. From a psychological point of view de Vignemont (2011) proposed an agenda of main issues wondering what is the fundamental role of body ownership, what grounds the sense of ownership, how is the sense of ownership related to bodily sensations, action and emotion, and whether it is possible to feel a sense of ownership for any extracorporeal object. In the present thesis I am going to present a progression of seven studies where I tried to characterize how body representation interacts with pain processing, investigating either patients presenting with body representation disorders and healthy people experiencing bodily misperceptions, by means of recording responses from the autonomous nervous system and ratings of pain experience under different conditions of body representation distortion. Taken together the studies presented show three main findings: an anticipatory response to incoming noxious stimuli is recordable when stimuli enter in the peripersonal space; an intact body representation is necessary to properly monitor noxious stimuli approaching to our own body; when the sense of ownership is transferred to an external object or a virtual body, a visual treat to that external object elicits anticipatory responses akin to those elicited by a menace directed to our own body. The present set of studies provide novel experimental evidence showing the critical influence of body representation for the mapping of sensory experience, in particular pain processing, and how the sense of ownership critically governs this interaction. Overall, the key contribution of the present work is to provide converging data, gathered from different models ranging from the study of pathological populations to the assessment of neurologically intact individuals by means of experimental manipulations, about the role of body representation for the efficient and safe interaction with the world around us, by correctly anticipating potentially dangerous incoming stimuli.File | Dimensione | Formato | |
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Phd_unimib_056253.pdf
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