Painful thoughts disrupt the feeling of owning one’s body, virtual reality study finds

A new study published in Frontiers in Psychology shows that imagining your body in pain—even if it’s just a virtual one—can make you feel less connected to it. Researchers found that when people were told to think of a virtual body as their own and imagine it experiencing abdominal pain, their sense of ownership over that body weakened. These findings may help explain why some individuals, especially those with experiences of depersonalization, struggle to feel connected to their own physical selves.

The study explored a psychological phenomenon known as body ownership—the fundamental sense that your body is yours. This feeling is not only essential for self-awareness but also helps you react to danger and interact with your environment. In people with conditions like depersonalization, this sense can break down. The researchers wanted to understand whether imagining a negative physical state—like pain—could interfere with this basic bodily awareness. They used a virtual reality setup to simulate ownership over a digital body and tested how participants responded to it under different mental interpretations.

To understand the study, it helps to know a bit about the concept of body ownership and how scientists simulate it. In experiments like the rubber hand illusion or the full-body illusion, people are tricked into feeling that an object—such as a fake hand or a virtual avatar—is actually part of their body. This usually involves synchronized visual and touch stimulation. For example, when someone sees a virtual back being stroked at the same time as their own back is touched in the same way, their brain can start to treat that virtual body as their own.

Previous research has shown that this illusion relies on both sensory signals and the mind’s expectations. If an object doesn’t resemble a body, the illusion is less likely to happen. Similarly, if a person is told the virtual body belongs to someone else, the feeling of ownership fades. In this study, the researchers wanted to go one step further by asking whether imagining the virtual body in a painful state—like having a stomachache—would disrupt the illusion, even if the person still believed it was their own.

The researchers recruited 32 male participants, ultimately including 27 in their final analysis after excluding some due to technical issues. All participants were healthy and wore a virtual reality headset that allowed them to see a 3D avatar from behind. During the experiment, participants experienced synchronized and unsynchronized stroking of their backs while watching a virtual body being stroked in the same way. Sometimes, they were instructed to think of the avatar as just a body. Other times, they were told to imagine it as their own body, either in a neutral state or while experiencing abdominal pain.

After the synchronized stroking, a fear-inducing animation—a knife appearing near the virtual back—was used to trigger a physical response. The researchers measured skin conductance, a signal that reflects the body’s automatic reaction to emotional stimuli. They also asked participants to fill out a questionnaire about how strongly they felt the virtual body was their own.

The results were striking. When participants were told to imagine the virtual body in pain, their physical reactions to the fear stimulus were significantly weaker than when they imagined the body as being in a neutral state. This suggested that they didn’t feel as connected to the virtual body in the pain condition. The questionnaire responses, which are more subjective, didn’t show the same effect—possibly because participants were influenced by the instructions to treat the body as their own, regardless of how they actually felt.

This contrast between objective physical reactions and subjective reports hints at the complexity of body ownership. While people might say they felt the virtual body was theirs, their nervous systems seemed to disagree when that body was imagined to be suffering. This difference was especially evident in the skin conductance responses, which are harder to fake or influence consciously.

The study also explored whether people with higher tendencies toward depersonalization were less likely to feel body ownership in the neutral condition. Earlier research had found such a relationship, and this study partly confirmed it. The correlation only held up when participants experienced the neutral condition before the pain condition. When they had already imagined the body in pain, that experience seemed to carry over and interfere with their ability to feel connected to the body in later trials.

This suggests that the negative interpretation of the body may have a lingering effect. People might start distancing themselves from their virtual body—even in later scenarios where no pain is involved—because of earlier associations. This could mirror real-life experiences in individuals who habitually see their bodies as sources of discomfort or danger, such as those with chronic depersonalization.

“Using the full-body illusion in virtual reality—where people begin to feel a virtual body as their own— we investigated how interpreting the virtual body as one’s own body, while in a negative physical state, affects this illusion. This research can possibly relate to depersonalization, a condition where people struggle to feel their body as their own,” explained Kazuki Yamamoto, an author of the study.

However, the researchers acknowledge some limitations. It’s not clear whether the reduced sense of ownership came specifically from the negative interpretation or from the mismatch between the real body (not in pain) and the imagined one (in pain). It’s possible that the brain resisted owning the virtual body simply because it didn’t match the participants’ actual physical state.

Another possible issue is the cognitive load. Imagining abdominal pain might require more mental effort than imagining a neutral state, drawing attention away from the synchronized sensory input that normally helps create the illusion. There’s also a chance that the fear-inducing knife animation influenced participants’ feelings about the virtual body in ways the researchers couldn’t fully measure.

Finally, the study used a third-person view, meaning participants saw the avatar from behind. Prior research suggests this setup produces weaker illusions than first-person views, where the virtual body aligns more closely with the viewer’s own perspective. Whether the same results would occur in a first-person setup remains an open question.

“While we observed this inhibitory effect, further research is needed to determine whether it was specifically due to the negative interpretation or to differences between actual and virtual body states,” explained co-author Takashi Nakao.

Still, the findings offer a valuable insight: when people imagine their body in a negative state, their brain may pull away from fully “owning” it—even if that body is only virtual. This sheds light on how mental interpretations and emotional states shape our connection to our own body, which could help in understanding conditions like depersonalization.

The study, “The manipulation of top-down interpretation as one’s symptomatic body reduces the sense of body ownership,” was authored by Kazuki Yamamoto and Takashi Nakao.