La linea sottile fra sé e l’altro: modificare la fiducia interpersonale, la cooperazione, ed i comportamenti di conformismo attraverso la stimolazione multisensoriale interpersonale.

Experiencing tactile facial stimulation while seeing similar synchronous stimuli on the face of another individual (Interpersonal Multisensory Stimulation, IMS) may blur the distinction between self and others by inducing 'enfacement', i.e. the subjective illusory experience of ownership of the other’s face, and a bias in attributing the others’ facial features to the self (Sforza, Bufalari et al., 2010). IMS may also change interpersonal perception by increasing closeness, attraction, and perceived similarity and by altering attitudes, such as implicit racial biases, towards the group that specific person belongs to. We explored the possibility that the tendency to include the other into one’s own face representation (i.e., enfacement) was dependent upon positive or negative interpersonal attitudes derived either from consolidated socio-cultural stereotypes (i.e., racial stereotypes) or from newly acquired, short-term individual interactions with a specific person. Results show that only positive interpersonal perception and attitudes derived from individual inter-actions influenced the enfacement strength. In fact, the self-attribution bias was stronger when the other was considered highly attractive and provided very positive feedback about the personality traits of the participant. No self-attribution bias was present instead when the other judged negatively the participant. We speculate that the tendency to enface only ‘positive’ others might occur to strengthen the set of perceptual or cognitive processes that maintain and protect positive self-views (i.e. ‘self-serving biases’), and ultimately has the potential to strengthen the positive view of the self. Interestingly, in fact, in another study we show that inducing enfacement may powerfully induce plastic changes into self-related neural processing making it similar to the other person. Indeed, enfacement modulates a long-latency Visual Evoked Potential (at about 300-700 ms after the presentation of the face stimuli; LLP), which is considered a reliable electrophysiological marker of self-identification process. While in the control condition the LPP amplitude differentiates between the Self and the Other face, this difference is cancelled out after experiencing enfacement with the other person. Thus, the enfacement illusion described in our studies may be fundamentally important not only because it may change interpersonal perception, but also because it suggests that conceptual and bodily features of others’ identity can be included -and induce analogous changes- in the notion of the self.