Introduction

Pleasure and pain, comfort and discomfort, hot and cold – we are creatures for whom states of affairs are imbued with goodness or badness. When they are bad, we experience the need to avoid or terminate the experience. Sometimes, like the character Tick in the quote above, we feel comparable subjective sensations when we see someone else in aversive circumstances, even though we ourselves might be quite safe from them.

Recent research hints that we, as body owners, perceive even the actions and sensations of other people through a ‘filter’ of our own bodily representations. Visual information about the goal-directed actions of others can engage action-preparation pathways in the brains of passive observers (di Pellegrino et al., 1992; Gallese et al., 1996; Rizzolatti et al., 1996).