Sense Of Agency: What Is A Sense Of Agency?

Sense of Agency
Barker (2005) defines sense of agency as the capacity of individuals to act independently and make their own free choices, and impose those choices on the world. Imposing those choices on the world, however, almost always affects another, this plays an important role in social interaction – an exchange between two or more individuals which is a building block of society.
According to Decety and Sommerville (2003), shared representation is a mental representation of an action executed by others which is reflected in a similar manner by an observer. However, shared is not synonymous to identical, otherwise representations of self and others would completely overlap, and lead to confusion. In shared representation, similar brain

According to Thomas (2013), dispositional empathy – also known as trait empathy – is an innate ability where people tend to imagine and experience the feelings and experiences of others. In contrast, situational empathy –also known as state empathy – is an immediate response to a specific eliciting situation. There are two components of empathy: cognitive and emotional. Cognitive empathy is how a person simply knows how the other person feels and what they might be thinking, sometimes called perspective-taking. Emotional empathy refers to the sensations and feelings we get in response to others’ emotions; this can include mirroring what that person is feeling, or just feeling stressed when we detect another’s fear or anxiety. According to Davis (1994) there is a third component for state empathy which is associative empathy which can be labelled as identification. Identification with the target is a mechanism through which the observer experiences response and interpretation of the emotion from the inside, as if the emotions the target is experiencing were happening to them. It facilitates social interaction and relationship development that links perception to action in the process of state

In the second experiment, they found that participants’ sense of agency over pain also affected their empathic response. The study showed that there was an increase of unpleasant feeling for the participants knowing that they are responsible for the observed pain and not the researchers. According to the study, it reveals an important and yet unexplored aspect of sense of agency: its role in social cognition. This present study would examine the effect of sense of agency on empathy which is suggested to rely on the same mechanism, that is, shared