First-person perspective sharpens the understanding of distressful physical feelings associated with physical disability: A functional magnetic resonance study

•We tested the effect of first-person perspective (FPP) on understanding disability.•Observers subjectively better understood feelings of disabled actions via the FPP.•The FPP activates various brain areas involved in body representation and empathy.•Observing people with disabilities from the FPP e...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Biological psychology 2020-11, Vol.157, p.107972-107972, Article 107972
Main Authors: Watanabe, Rui, Kim, Yuri, Kikuchi, Yoshiaki
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Body representation
Brain - diagnostic imaging
Brain Mapping
Emotions
Empathy
fMRI
Hemiplegia
Humans
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy
Personal distress
Visual perspective
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Summary:•We tested the effect of first-person perspective (FPP) on understanding disability.•Observers subjectively better understood feelings of disabled actions via the FPP.•The FPP activates various brain areas involved in body representation and empathy.•Observing people with disabilities from the FPP enhances empathy. We investigated whether observation of hand movements of people with hemiplegia by healthy individuals from the first-person perspective (FPP), compared to that from the third-person perspective (TPP), enables better understanding of disability-associated distress. We measured the neural activity of healthy individuals using functional magnetic resonance imaging while they observed hemiplegic movements from the FPP or TPP. Subjective assessment of the movements was determined with questionnaires. Compared to the TPP, the FPP elicited stronger activation in the inferior parietal lobule (IPL), right temporoparietal junction, and anterior cingulate cortex, which are associated with body representation, mentalization, and empathy, respectively. Enhanced IPL activity correlated positively with personal empathic traits. Observing movements of hemiplegic individuals from the FPP provided precise subjective understanding of the physically distressing aspects of their movements. These findings suggest that observing hemiplegic individuals from the FPP effectively improved observers’ understanding of disability-associated distress via body representation, mentalization, and empathy systems.
ISSN:0301-0511
1873-6246
DOI:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2020.107972