In an eyebrow-raising new paper, neuroscientists report that they had participants wear a ball gag while watching images of people in pain. The lucky participants in this neuro-bondage were all female BDSM submissives, and their brain activity in response to the painful pictures was recorded with EEG.
Here’s the article: Embodiment and Humiliation Moderation of Neural Responses to Others’ Suffering in Female Submissive BDSM Practitioners
And here’s some of the stimuli (I assume they were not blurred-out in the real study):
According to authors Siyang Luo and Xiao Zhang, the rationale for the experiment was that the ball gag might inhibit the brain’s empathetic response to suffering by preventing facial muscle movements. This would be in line with embodied emotion theories, which posit that our facial expressions can actually drive our emotional reactions.
Indeed, the data showed that compared to a control condition (no ball gag), gagging seemingly inhibited neural ...
