The relationship between sense of body ownership and agency

The main goal here was to understand the link between the two crucial components of the bodily self, sense of body ownership and sense of agency (13), starting from a neuropsychological approach.
With a counterintuitive approach, I found that hemiplegic patients (who cannot move the left body side) strongly and easily experience the RHI (the mismatch between a real-hidden and a fake-visible hand, simultaneously touched, induces the embodiment of the fake hand) but only on the plegic hand (14). I lately confirmed the same result in a group of young participants by immobilizing their left hand for one week (15).
Together with international co-workers, I also found interesting results in PTSD patients with dissociative symptoms: they showed increased vulnerability to manipulation of embodiment, emphasizing the supportive role played by sense of agency for the maintenance of body ownership (16,17).
Physiological data corroborated those results, highlighting the role of top-down modulation of volitional actions on defensive mechanisms (18).

Related publications
13. Pyasik M, Burin D, Pia L. On the relation between body ownership and sense of agency: A link at the level of sensory-related signals. Acta Psychol (Amst). 2018;185:219–28. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2018.03.001.
14. Burin D, Livelli A, Garbarini F, Fossataro C, Folegatti A, Gindri P, et al. Are movements necessary for the sense of body ownership? evidence from the rubber hand illusion in pure hemiplegic patients. PLoS One. 2015;10(3). doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0117155.
15. Burin D, Garbarini F, Bruno V, Fossataro C, Destefanis C, Berti A, et Neuropsychologia. 2017;107:41–7. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.11.004.
16. Rabellino D, Harricharan S, Frewen PA, Burin D, McKinnon MC, Lanius RA. “I can’t tell whether it’s my hand”: A pilot study of the neurophenomenology of body representation during the rubber hand illusion in trauma-related disorders. Eur J Psychotraumatol. 2016;7(1). doi: 10.3402/ejpt.v7.32918.
17. Rabellino D, Burin D, Harricharan S, Lloyd C, Frewen PA, McKinnon MC, et al. Altered sense of body ownership and agency in posttraumatic stress disorder and its dissociative subtype: A rubber hand illusion study. Front Hum Neurosci. 2018;12. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2018.00163.
18. Fossataro C, Burin D, Ronga I, Galigani M, Rossi Sebastiano A, Pia L, et al. Agent-dependent modulation of corticospinal excitability during painful transcutaneous electrical stimulation. Neuroimage. 2020; DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116897. al. Movements and body ownership: Evidence from the rubber hand illusion after mechanical limb immobilization.