Enfacement Illusion and Chronic Migraine Pain

The concept of body image can be described as "the intentional content of consciousness comprising perceptions, attitudes and beliefs relating to one's body". Over the years, there has been a growing interest in this topic, highlighting that body image can be distorted in people suffering from pain conditions, especially in the case of chronic pain. One way of modulating the perception of pain through the perception of body image is through the use of interventions based on visual feedback. In this regard, some studies have highlighted the possibility of reducing the perception of pain in healthy and clinical populations with the use of "illusions" of one's own body created through immersive virtual reality. For example, through the use of synchronous visual-tactile multisensory stimulation on one's own face / body and on that of others (fake body), is possible to induce illusions of self-recognition in other fake bodies. In the case of the face, this type of illusion of belonging of other faces is commonly known as the "enfacement illusion", through which is possible to change or modulate the self-representation, with important implications for all those subjects who have distorted body representations, such as patients suffering from chronic pain. The main goal of the present protocol is to evaluate the effects of an experimental treatment based on enfacement illusion on the perception of pain (VAS scale) with respect to a control condition (pleasant virtual environment exposure). The secondary objective is to study any correlations between pain and body image, personal, clinical and psychological intrapersonal variables. One-hundred patients with chronic headache will be randomly assigned to the two conditions: experimental group (based on the "enfacement illusion") and control group (exposed to a pleasant virtual environment). Both conditions include an immersive virtual reality treatment of 3 sessions of 15 minutes each, during one week.