The Vicarious Experiences Questionnaire(s): Online Tools for Measuring Mirror-Touch and Vicarious Pain

Vicarious experiences refer to shared feelings (e.g., emotion contagion) and sensations (e.g., pain or touch) that occur when an observer sees (or otherwise infers) that another person is in that state. There may be stable trait-level individual differences in this tendency. Here we report a dataset from two previously developed measures for vicarious touch and pain (Mirror-touch Questionnaire and Vicarious Pain Questionnaire), which we collectively term the Vicarious Experiences Questionnaire. As well as making this dataset publicly available, we also include a novel analysis of the data, together with tools for enabling other researchers to collect and analyse this data (video stimuli, an importable Qualtrics survey, and Excel sheets for classifying participants). We show that a subset of the ‘normal’ population experience reportable sensations of touch and pain when seeing it in others and demonstrate how they may be classified into several different groups. With regards to vicarious pain, we report separate ‘sensory-localised’ and ‘affective-general’ groups (alongside non-responders) and consider the extent to which such differences are categorical or dimensional. For vicarious touch (or mirror-touch), we show that this tends to be found in people with a more extreme ‘sensory-localised’ profile for vicarious pain. The affective-general group has a stronger gender bias (F>M) that is weaker in the sensory-localised group and absent for mirror-touch.