If you have ever watched a frightening movie which seemed so real, you felt a physical sensation in your own body if the characters on screen were hurt, you could be experiencing a phenomenon known as vicarious pain.
Feeling your pain: study participants were asked to watch a range of tactile videos including people experiencing an injection, being poked with tweezers and hands touching fluffly textiles.
In a new paper published in Scientific Reports, Macquarie University researchers found vicarious touch or pain is far more common than previously thought.
In the study, four out of five people reported feeling at least one sensation ranging from a tingle to a pain, when seeing a video of someone else being touched.
Dr Sophie Smit, postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Psychological Sciences and lead author of the study Characteristics of vicarious touch reports in a general population, defines vicarious touch as the experience of tactile sensations simply by observing someone else being touched.
"It feels like you're actually the one experiencing the touch or the pain, at least to some extent," says Dr Smit.
"Some people have a tactile sensation that is very similar to what they've observed, and this is often located in the same body part.
"Others might experience it more as a vague or diffuse feeling, such as a tingle.
"And yet others feel nothing at all. There seem to be a few different kinds of experiences involved in vicarious touch."
Research aims
The goal of the study by Dr Smit, her supervisor Professor Anina Rich and colleagues, was to understand how widespread vicarious sensations really are, and what influences the kind of feelings people report.
Early studies have found that individuals sensitive to ASMR are significantly more prone to vicarious touch, suggesting they may share common underlying neural mechanisms.
"We were trying to establish whether this is a rare or common experience, and it turns out it's remarkably common," Dr Smit says.
"Now that we know this, we can start to explore how these vicarious sensations relate to empathy and mental health, and how they might affect people in emotionally demanding roles like healthcare."
For example, their findings could have real world applications for a nurse who feels a patient's pain in their body and who may be more vulnerable to distress or burnout.
But Dr Smit says with the right training tools, people could learn to regulate these responses, set better boundaries when needed, or even enhance them in situations where empathy and connection are critical.
TikTok crossover?
Vicarious touch may also overlap with the wildly-popular phenomenon of autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) - those soothing tingles triggered not only by sounds like soft whispering or tapping, but also by watching someone brush hair, apply make-up or give a scalp massage.
Social media platforms like TikTok are awash with videos of imaginary hair brushing and make up applications said to be calming for viewers.
Dr Smith says early studies have found that individuals sensitive to ASMR are significantly more prone to vicarious touch, suggesting they may share common underlying neural mechanisms.
And she points out that the more extreme instances of vicarious touch are often considered a type of synaesthesia, a condition where a certain sensory input evokes an unusual secondary experience.
In this case seeing touch consistently results in feeling touch, and it is therefore called 'mirror-touch synaesthesia'.
"These are rare cases where people are feeling others' touch or pain on a regular basis," Dr Smit says.
"Most people with vicarious touch typically do not even notice they can experience it, unless they're focused on it, like in experimental settings."
Research findings
In Dr Smit's latest study published in Scientific Reports, 84 per cent of 422 participants reported at least one vicarious sensation such as tingling, pressure or pain, usually matching the location of touch they'd observed.
They had been shown 40 short videos of another person's hand being touched. These 40 videos were divided into four types of sensations so the participants were shown 10 each of a neutral, pleasant, unpleasant or painful sensation.
Response: The research found a large majority of participants reported a physical response to at least one of the study videos, which included watching a person being given an injection.
These included a hand being pushed by another finger, or poked with scissors or a knife, stroked by a fluffy cloth, pinched by tweezers or given an injection.
Participants were then asked to report whether they had felt any sensation in their body, and if so where and what kind of feeling it was?
"We found a surprisingly large majority reported some kind of physical response to at least one video," Dr Smit says.
Vicarious touch was more common in women than men, but the reason for this was unclear.
"Those with an inclination to strongly feel other people's sensations can find this really distressing and on occasion people have reached out to me to ask if there is a way of dealing with it," Dr Smit says.
"So the next step I'm very interested in is trying to discover if people can somehow learn to regulate this better?"
Dr Sophie Smit is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Psychological Sciences, Macquarie University.
