Getting in Touch with the Lost Self: Vicarious and Affective Touch in Depersonalisation

We conducted an online study featuring two experiments in order to examine the relationship between depersonalization experiences (DP) (i.e. feelings of being detached from one’s self and body) and vicarious affective touch and self-touch. Experiment 1 examined to what extent DP traits modulate the perceived pleasantness and/or vividness of tactile experiences as imagined being received by the self and other. In experiment 2 we designed a new affective self-touch intervention in order to explore the effect of CT-optimal self-touch stroking on one’s dorsal forearm on the perceived pleasantness and vividness of tactile experiences as being received by the self and other. We found that low DP individuals reported higher perceived pleasantness and vividness rating for touch. By contrast, the high DP cohort rated all touch experiences as significantly less pleasant. No significant interaction effects for vividness ratings of touch experiences across low and high DP. In addition, our results suggest that people with low DP rate the perceived pleasantness of the imagined social touch experiences as received by the self higher than if received by the other. Interestingly, in high DP individuals, there is no difference in the perceived pleasantness of affective touch imagined as being received by the self vs the other. Finally, we found that both low and high DP participants, following our tailored CT-optimal affective self-touch intervention on one’s own body, report significantly higher ratings of vividness of tactile perception.

A replication of “The Ganzflicker experience” with a sample size of 1587

“Ganzflicker” is a full-field, rhythmic visual flicker, using a technique that is known to elicit pseudo-hallucinations and altered states of consciousness (Allefeld et al., 2011; Bartossek et al., 2021; Schwartzman et al., 2019; Sumich et al., 2018). In a recently published study (Königsmark et al., 2021), we found individual differences in the likelihood of reporting visual pseudo-hallucinations, as well as different features of pseudo-hallucinations, while observing 10 minutes of continuous red-and-black flicker at 7.5 Hz, termed “Ganzflicker”. In a post-experience questionnaire of 204 responses, we found extremely strong evidence that the likelihood of experiencing complex and vivid pseudo-hallucinations is related to self-reported visual mental imagery vividness. Specifically, people with no visual imagery (or, at most, dim or vague imagery; aphantasia distribution) are much less likely to experience vivid and complex pseudo-hallucinations than people with moderate-to-vivid visual imagery (imagery distribution).In this commentary, I present an updated analysis of Ganzflicker questionnaire responses, due to a significant increase in the number of new data points collected (N = 5553), influenced by a recent article published in the popular media (Reeder, n.d.). In this new analysis, environmental variables were found to play a role in pseudo-hallucination proneness, particularly concerning whether participants viewed the Ganzflicker on a computer or mobile phone. This suggests that the level of visual immersion increases the likelihood of anomalous perceptual experiences. I also found extremely strong evidence that pseudo-hallucination proneness differs between people with a completely blind mind’s eye (imagery vividness rating = 0) compared to people with imagery, regardless of imagery vividness rating (ratings 1-10). This suggests that there are sometimes important distinctions between having low imagery and no imagery. I additionally found differences in the reported complexity and vividness of pseudo-hallucinations between people belonging to the aphantasia distribution (vividness ratings from 0-3) and imagery distribution (vividness ratings from 4-10), replicating previous results. Finally, I found that people belonging to the imagery distribution are more likely to see more frequent pseudo-hallucinations for a longer duration than people from the aphantasia distribution. In sum, I replicated the core result of the previous paper in a dataset that is orders of magnitude larger than the original.

Vividness of Visual Imagery for Faces as a Predictor of Facial Recognition Memory Performance: A Revised View

This paper presents a re-analysis of previously reported data in which the mean correlation over 10 experiments between vividness of visual imagery for faces and facial recognition memory was .247. When task accuracy was consistently scored to eliminate false-alarms, the correlation dropped to .145, although it remained above zero. Since the vividness/task confidence correlation of .176 was also significant, it is suggested that the weak vividness/accuracy relationship may reflect different processing requirements in the vividness and recognition tasks and subjectivity of the vividness rating scale.