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Facial mimicry, the automatic imitation of another person's emotion, is a mechanism underlying emotion recognition and emotional contagion, a phylogenetically conserved form of empathy that precedes later developing empathic skills. We tested the possibility to increase facial mimicry by blurring self-other distinction via the enfacement illusion. To do so we delivered synchronous, versus asynchronous, visuo-tactile interpersonal multisensory stimulation on the observer and expresser's faces and then recorded surface facial EMG while participants observed videos of happy and sad facial expressions displayed by the expresser. Our results show that synchronous visuo-tactile stimulation can indeed enhance facial mimicry and that this depends on participants' baseline tendency to mimic.. Our findings could set the basis for developing novel interventions for conditions characterized by reduced empathic and emotion recognition skills, including autism and schizophrenia., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Understanding how self-representation is built, maintained and updated across the lifespan is a fundamental challenge for cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Studies demonstrate that the detection of body-related multisensory congruency builds bodily and facial self-representations that are crucial to developing self-recognition. Studies showing that the bodily self is more malleable than previously believed were mainly concerned with full-bodies and non-facial body parts. Crucially, however, intriguing recent evidence indicates that simple experimental manipulations could even affect self-face representation that has long been considered a stable construct impervious to change. In this review, we discuss how Interpersonal Multisensory Stimulation (IMS) paradigms can be used to temporarily induce Enfacement, i.e., the subjective illusion of looking at oneself in the mirror when in fact looking at another person's face. We show that Enfacement is a subtle but robust phenomenon occurring in a variety of experimental conditions and assessed by multiple explicit and implicit measures. We critically discuss recent findings on i) the role of sensory extero/proprio-ceptive (visual, tactile, and motor) and interoceptive (cardiac) signals in self-face plasticity, ii) the importance of multisensory integration mechanisms for the bodily self, and iii) the neural network related to IMS-driven changes in self-other face processing, within the predictive coding theoretical framework., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Perceiving pain in others may induce the covert simulation of both sensory and emotional components of others' pain experience. Previous transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) studies have investigated the motor counterpart of this resonant mapping by showing suppression of motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) during the observation of a needle entering body parts of another person. Here we explored whether MEPs recorded from an onlooker's hand (e.g., the right hand, TMS to the left motor cortex) are differentially influenced by the observation of painfully stimuli delivered to the same (right) or the opposite (left) hand in a model. Congruency between observed (model) and recorded (onlooker) hand brought about a reduction of MEPs amplitude. This resonant inhibitory response in the onlooker was specific for the muscle penetrated in the model. In contrast, observing pain on the model's hand opposite to that from which MEPs were recorded brought about a generalized increase of hand corticospinal excitability. Corticospinal inhibition and facilitation effects were comparable in the two hemispheres and specific for the corresponding and opposite hand. Results suggest that observing pain in another person's hand automatically induces the covert simulation of potentially adaptive freezing and avoidance responses in the onlooker's corticospinal system.