de Guzman Marie, Bird Geoffrey, Banissy Michael J, Catmur Caroline
Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, UK.
Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, De Crespigny Park, London SE5 8AF, UK Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, 17 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, UK.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2016 Jan 19;371(1686):20150079. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2015.0079.
We review the evidence that an ability to achieve a precise balance between representing the self and representing other people is crucial in social interaction. This ability is required for imitation, perspective-taking, theory of mind and empathy; and disruption to this ability may contribute to the symptoms of clinical and sub-clinical conditions, including autism spectrum disorder and mirror-touch synaesthesia. Moving beyond correlational approaches, a recent intervention study demonstrated that training participants to control representations of the self and others improves their ability to control imitative behaviour, and to take another's visual perspective. However, it is unclear whether these effects apply to other areas of social interaction, such as the ability to empathize with others. We report original data showing that participants trained to increase self-other control in the motor domain demonstrated increased empathic corticospinal responses (Experiment 1) and self-reported empathy (Experiment 2), as well as an increased ability to control imitation. These results suggest that the ability to control self and other representations contributes to empathy as well as to other types of social interaction.
我们回顾了相关证据，即在自我表征和他人表征之间实现精确平衡的能力在社交互动中至关重要。模仿、换位思考、心理理论和同理心都需要这种能力；而这种能力的破坏可能会导致临床和亚临床病症的症状，包括自闭症谱系障碍和镜像触觉联觉。除了相关研究方法，最近的一项干预研究表明，训练参与者控制自我和他人的表征可以提高他们控制模仿行为以及采取他人视觉视角的能力。然而，尚不清楚这些效果是否适用于社交互动的其他领域，比如对他人产生同理心的能力。我们报告了原始数据，表明在运动领域接受训练以增强自我-他人控制能力的参与者表现出增强的共情皮质脊髓反应（实验1）和自我报告的同理心（实验2），以及增强的控制模仿能力。这些结果表明，控制自我和他人表征的能力有助于同理心以及其他类型的社交互动。
