Body Awareness & First-Person Experience

First-person experience relates to experiencing oneself as the actor or agent of their current thoughts. That is, their thoughts are more "I"-centered. For example, thinking to yourself "it is raining" is less of a first-person experience than "I am hungry right now". This first-person experience is thought to be the basis of conscious experience, and greater first-person experience is related to a variety of mental health outcomes, including lesser dissociation symptoms. There is much evidence that first-person experience is related to the processing of body sensations (specifically sensations from the heart) within the brain.

Here, I was interested in how subjective experience of the body (body awareness) related to first-person experience. Through a set of two studies, I found that in moments where participants reported experiencing greater awareness of the body, they also reported greater experience of themselves within the first-person. Additionally, when their thought contents were more embodied (i.e. used more body-focused language), they also had greater "I"-centered thoughts. This is critical as it showed that subjective experience of the body, beyond the simple processing of the body within the brain, plays a role in experiencing oneself from the first-person perspective.

Through this set of studies, I aided in both the design and implementation of ecological momentary assessment (experience sampling) designs. I also cleaned and analyzed the data, and presented the results as a publication. Within the data analysis, I utilized multi-level linear regression modeling approaches, correlational approaches, ANOVAs, and t-tests. I also had the opportunity to use natural language processing of the current thoughts provided by participants. Within the NLP approach, I used R for text cleaning and preparation, and designed a Python pipeline to compare our texts to a normed lexicon. Please see the publication for more details.