How disentangled sense of agency and sense of ownership can interact with different emotional events on stress feelings

Abstract

We used the virtual hand illusion paradigm to study how sense of agency and sense of (body) ownership can interact with different emotional events on stress feelings. Converging evidence for at least the partial independence of agency and ownership was found. For instance, sense of agency was a better predictor of individual anxiety levels than sense of ownership and males showed stronger effects related to agency-presumably due to gender-specific attribution styles and empathy skills. Moreover, agency and ownership also interacted with emotional events and led to different anxiety levels. Taken together, our findings suggest that the disentangled sense of agency and sense of ownership can interact with different emotional events and influenced stress feelings more in threatening situations than awarding ones.