Losing Touch with Oneself: Depersonalisation Experiences Modulate Vicarious Affective Touch and Self Touch

Abstract Depersonalisation (DP) is characterized by distressing feelings of being detached from one’s self and body, often described as being “out of touch” with oneself. We conducted two online experiments looking at the relationship between non-clinical experiences of DP and vicarious affective touch and self touch. In Experiment 1 we found that people with lower occurrences of DP rate the perceived pleasantness of the imagined social touch as received by the self higher than if received by the other. By contrast, we found no difference in the perceived pleasantness of affective touch imagined as being received by the self vs the other in people with higher occurrences of DP experiences. In Experiment 2, we designed a new affective self-touch intervention in order to explore the effect of affective self-touch stroking on one’s dorsal forearm on the perceived pleasantness and vividness of tactile experiences as being received by the self and others . We found that both low and high DP participants, following the affective self-touch intervention, report significantly higher ratings of vividness of tactile perception. These findings may have key implications for potential sensory tactile-based interventions for people experiencing distressing feelings of DP.