New study finds that a surprisingly large number of us may experience these phantom touches.
15 December 2025
By Emma Young
Have you ever seen an actor being stroked — or grabbed — on TV, and felt some kind of 'echo' of that touch on your own body? If so, you experience so-called 'vicarious touch', and according to recent work in Scientific Reports, you are very far from being alone.
Most research in the field to date has focused on people with 'mirror-touch synaesthesia', a rare condition that involves frequent and powerful touch perceptions in response to seeing someone else being touched. But Sophie Smit at Macquarie University, Australia, and colleagues wanted to explore how common less extreme forms of this experience might be in the general population.
The team recruited 422 student participants for their online study. Each participant watched 40 brief videos of a woman touching her own left hand with her own right hand, either directly or with an object, such as a brush or a knife. They also watched five videos showing an object — a white block — being touched.
After each video, the participants were asked if, while viewing it, they'd had experience any tactile sensations on their own body. If the answer was 'no', they moved to the next video. If it was 'yes', they were asked to choose adjectives that best described the sensation (the list included: touch, pain, tingling, pressure, scratching, ticklish, warm, cold and other — and they were asked to describe the sensation). They were also asked how intense this sensation was; whether it felt neutral, unpleasant, pleasant or painful; and also where on their body they felt it.
When the team analysed the results, they found that overall, 84% of the participants reported at least one vicarious touch sensation while watching the self-touch videos. (These sensations were much less likely in response to seeing the block being touched.) Participants in this group reported a vicarious response to, on average, about a quarter of the videos.
These sensations were most commonly felt in the hands, with the left hand — the hand that was touched in the self-touch videos — being identified as the location for just over half of the sensations, and just over a quarter in the right hand. However, almost one in ten of the vicarious responses were identified as being a 'general feeling' in the body, not specific to any part.
Smit and her colleagues also found that, on average, videos deemed to show painful or pleasant touch were most likely to evoke vicarious touch perceptions, followed by unpleasant and then neutral videos. The type of touch shown in the video also influenced the perception — for example, a video of a hand being pressed hard with a pair of scissors tended to evoke feelings of 'pressure', while a video showing scissors gently touching the hand were more likely to trigger a 'tingling'.
The team also found that more women (88%) than men (76%) reported having at least one vicarious touch sensation. Although the women in the study scored higher on the 'emotional reactivity' sub-scale of an emotional intelligence measure, there was no clear link between individual emotional reactivity and vicarious perceptions — so, it's not clear what might underpin the gender difference.
Based on the overall responses, the team also identified three 'clusters' of participants who experienced vicarious touch. One cluster, which comprised just over a third of the group, had the lowest levels of vicarious responses and also reported more general 'tingling' sensations. The second cluster, which accounted for just over half of the group, reported moderate frequencies of vicarious touch, but quite intense responses. The third (12% of the group) reported feeling vicarious touch in response to most of the videos, and these tended to be distinct sensations on their hands; they also had the most intense responses to the videos that depicted potentially painful types of touch.
For the researchers, the biggest take-away from their study is that vicarious touch perceptions in some form or other are far from being rare. "The high prevalence underscores a broad capacity for sensory mirroring in the general population that extends beyond the specialised phenomenon of mirror-touch synaesthesia," they write. The variation in responses within their sample also suggests that there is a spectrum of vicarious touch within the general population, with mirror-touch perhaps representing the extreme end of this spectrum.
This study certainly adds to our understanding of vicarious touch and sensory mirroring. More broadly, though, it contributes to the idea from other work on the senses — such as studies finding clear discrepancies in how we see and smell the world, for example — that different people sense the world in sometimes very different ways.
Read the paper in full:
Smit, S., Crossley, M. J., Zopf, R., & Rich, A. N. (2025). Characteristics of vicarious touch reports in a general population. Scientific Reports, 15(1), 33458–33458. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-03194-2
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