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

- Direct gaze was shown to increase bodily self-awareness.
- We tested if the belief to be watched by another triggers similar effect.
- Subjects' accuracy in judging their body emotional arousal state was measured.
- We show that the belief to be watched lead to increased interoceptive accuracy.
- Basic mentalizing may be a key process in the self-awareness effect of direct gaze.

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. We manipulated the participants to believe that they were in on-line connection with the individual and that one of the pairs of sunglasses was obstructed so that the individual could not see them through it. We demonstrated that the perception of an individual wearing see-through sunglasses, as compared to obstructed sunglasses or a low-level baseline condition, led to a greater correlation between the participants' rating of the intensity of their bodily reactions and their skin conductance response to emotional pictures. This shows that the belief to be watched by another social agent increases bodily self-awareness and further suggests that such belief is embedded in direct gaze perception.