Social Contact Enhances Bodily Self-Awareness

International audienceHuman self‐awareness is arguably the mostimportant and revealing question of modern sciences. Converging theoretical perspectives link self awareness and social abilities in human beings. In particular, mutual engagement during social interactions—or social contact—would boost self‐ awareness.Yet, empirical evidence forthis effectis scarce.We recently showed thatthe perception of eye contactinduces enhanced bodily self‐ awareness. Here, we aimed at extending these findings by testing the influence of social contactin auditory and tactile modalities, in orderto demonstrate that social contact enhances bodily self‐awareness irrespective of sensory modality. In a first experiment, participants were exposed to hearing their own first name (as compared to another unfamiliar name and noise). In a second experiment, human touch (as compared to brush touch and no‐touch) was used as the social contact cue. In both experiments, participants demonstrated more accurate rating of their bodily reactions in response to emotional pictures following the social contact condition—a proxy of bodily self‐awareness. Further analyses indicated thatthe effect of social contact was comparable across tactile, auditory and visual modalities.These results provide the first direct empirical evidence in support ofthe essential social nature of human self‐awareness