Social Contact Enhances Bodily Self-Awareness.

Human self-awareness is arguably the most important 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.

I know you can see me: Social attention influences bodily self-awareness.

It has recently been demonstrated that eye contact influences bodily self-awareness. Here, we investigated if the belief of being the target of another person's attention may also induce such influence. We created videos of an individual wearing two different pairs of sunglasses.

Eye contact elicits bodily self-awareness in human adults.

Eye contact is a typical human behaviour known to impact concurrent or subsequent cognitive processing. In particular, it has been suggested that eye contact induces self-awareness, though this has never been formally proven. Here, we show that the perception of a face with a direct gaze (that establishes eye contact), as compared to either a face with averted gaze or a mere fixation cross, led adult participants to rate more accurately the intensity of their physiological reactions induced by emotional pictures.