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This article introduces a special issue on body representation and body transformations in neuropsychology and embodied neuroscience. It discusses the concept of body representations and their plasticity, exploring how factors such as aging, weight changes, technology, and social interactions influence them. The special issue includes papers on various aspects of body representation, including historical reviews, virtual reality assessments, and the impact of pain on body representation. The text emphasizes the need for an interdisciplinary approach to studying body representation and highlights the relevance of this research in understanding the complex interactions between the brain, body, and environment. It also introduces the concept of predictive processing and Bayesian inference as frameworks for understanding how the brain represents and updates internal models of the body. The document is a list of references to scientific articles and studies related to body schema and body image, covering a wide range of topics in this field. [Extracted from the article]

Touch offers important non-verbal possibilities for socioaffective communication. Yet most digital communications lack capabilities regarding exchanging affective tactile messages (tactile emoticons). Additionally, previous studies on tactile emoticons have not capitalised on knowledge about the affective effects of certain mechanoreceptors in the human skin, e.g., the C-Tactile (CT) system. Here, we examined whether gentle manual stroking delivered in velocities known to optimally activate the CT system (defined as 'tactile emoticons'), during lab-simulated social media communications could convey increased feelings of social support and other prosocial intentions compared to (1) either stroking touch at CT sub-optimal velocities, or (2) standard visual emoticons. Participants (N = 36) felt more social intent with CT-optimal compared to sub-optimal velocities, or visual emoticons. In a second, preregistered study (N = 52), we investigated whether combining visual emoticons with tactile emoticons, this time delivered at CT-optimal velocities by a soft robotic device, could enhance the perception of prosocial intentions and affect participants' physiological measures (e.g., skin conductance rate) in comparison to visual emoticons alone. Visuotactile emoticons conveyed more social intent overall and in anxious participants affected physiological measures more than visual emoticons. The results suggest that emotional social media communications can be meaningfully enhanced by tactile emoticons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Body dysmorphic disorder is a severe psychiatric condition characterised by a preoccupation with a perceived appearance flaw or flaws that are typically not observable to others. Although significant advances in understanding the disorder have been made in the past decade, current explanations focus on cognitive, behavioural and visual perceptual disturbances that contribute to the disorder. Such a focus does not consider how perception of the internal body or interoception may be involved, despite (1) clinical observations of disturbed perception of the body in body dysmorphic disorder and (2) disturbed interoception being increasingly recognised as a transdiagnostic factor underlying a wide range of psychopathologies. In this paper, we use an existing model of hierarchical brain function and neural (predictive) processing to propose that body dysmorphic disorder involves defective interoception, with perceived appearance flaws being the result of 'interoceptive prediction errors' that cause body parts to be experienced as 'not just right'. We aim to provide a framework for interoceptive research into body dysmorphic disorder, and outline areas for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]