Mirror Touch Synesthesia: Is It a Real Thing? Experts Investigate the Rare Condition of Feeling Other People’s Sensation

Empathy is considered an important, foundational emotion that makes us human. It is referred to as a person's ability to understand other people's feelings and thoughts. Most people can show empathy to a certain degree by putting themselves in another person's position. This emotional connection is an important social skill for humans, and they thrive in groups, as they need the best chances for survival.

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The ability to feel what other people feel looks like a blessing, but it can also be a very stressful condition affecting a person's life. Some people experience a condition known as mirror touch synesthesia (MTS), where they feel a sensation of touch when they see other people being touched. According to the University of Delaware (UD), about two in 100 people have this condition.

Feeling Other People's Pain

UD researchers led by Carrie DePasquale conducted a study to reveal new information about mirror touch synesthesia. The team used 2,351 UD undergraduate psychology students as research participants. They showed 45 mirror-touch syntheses videos of a hand being touched, and the participants were asked to report if they felt the touch on their bodies. While viewing the video, the hand posture of each participant was either congruent or incongruent with the posture of the considered body. The result of the study provides evidence that body schema or online representation of body position in space is involved in mapping touch from a viewed body to a person's own body.

In a separate study, researchers led by Simon Baron-Cohen tried to link MTS with enhanced empathy to test claims involving this condition. The team adopted a conservative approach in selecting participants who took three measures of empathy and one measure of autism. The result of the study disputes the claims that MTS is connected to enhanced empathy, is less likely to occur with elevated autistic traits, and is specific only to see a person being touched.

How to Deal with Mirror Touch Synesthesia

Mirror touch synesthesia is just one of the two subtypes of synesthesia. The first one is the anatomical subtype, where an individual experiences a feeling of touch on the same side of the body where the other person is touched. On the other hand, the mirror type is the most common and involves experiencing a sensation on the opposite side of the body.

Some symptoms of mirror touch synesthesia include feeling pain in the opposite side of the body when another individual feels pain; having a touch sensation upon seeing another individual being touched; and experiencing various sensations such as itching, pressure, and tingling. Most people with MTS report having this condition since childhood.

Health experts still do not have specific tests for diagnosing MTS, and most symptoms are self-reported. To help the doctors with the diagnosis, experts use strategies such as videos of an individual being touched and watching how a person under study responds to them.

Experiencing the touch sensations of others can be difficult for some people, while some may view it as beneficial since they can easily relate to others. For others, MTS is associated with negative emotions because of what they see and feel from another person.

Some people prefer to undergo therapy sessions to process their sensations better. Examples of these sessions include imagining a protective barrier between the patient and the person touched. There are also prescription drugs that can benefit people with MTS as they help manage emotions triggered by the condition, such as anxiety and depression.