NeuroImage
-
A growing number of studies in exploring empathic modulation have revealed the neural substrates of how social stimuli are represented in the human brain, especially the pain of others. The empathic response of observing other's gains and losses, however, remains not clearly characterized. In the current study, we carried out two experiments with a gamble task to investigate how the effects of interpersonal familiarity and self-participation work on modulating the temporal neural response towards gain and loss of a friend or a stranger using scalp-recorded event-related potentials (ERPs). ⋯ But the distinction of differentiated feedback-related negativity (d-FRN) between friends and strangers was only observed when the player was not involved in the game. These results indicated that the participants exerted more motivational relevance toward their friends than strangers, but the participants' empathic response toward friends was only salient when they were not involved in the gamble directly. Therefore, both familiarity and self-engagement are factors that influence the empathy towards others, complementing the recent research on empathic modulation.
-
Review Meta Analysis
Meta-analytic evidence for common and distinct neural networks associated with directly experienced pain and empathy for pain.
A growing body of evidence suggests that empathy for pain is underpinned by neural structures that are also involved in the direct experience of pain. In order to assess the consistency of this finding, an image-based meta-analysis of nine independent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) investigations and a coordinate-based meta-analysis of 32 studies that had investigated empathy for pain using fMRI were conducted. The results indicate that a core network consisting of bilateral anterior insular cortex and medial/anterior cingulate cortex is associated with empathy for pain. ⋯ Moreover, the image-based analysis demonstrates that depending on the type of experimental paradigm this core network was co-activated with distinct brain regions: While viewing pictures of body parts in painful situations recruited areas underpinning action understanding (inferior parietal/ventral premotor cortices) to a stronger extent, eliciting empathy by means of abstract visual information about the other's affective state more strongly engaged areas associated with inferring and representing mental states of self and other (precuneus, ventral medial prefrontal cortex, superior temporal cortex, and temporo-parietal junction). In addition, only the picture-based paradigms activated somatosensory areas, indicating that previous discrepancies concerning somatosensory activity during empathy for pain might have resulted from differences in experimental paradigms. We conclude that social neuroscience paradigms provide reliable and accurate insights into complex social phenomena such as empathy and that meta-analyses of previous studies are a valuable tool in this endeavor.
-
Functional neuroimaging studies in humans have shown that nociceptive stimuli elicit activity in a wide network of cortical areas commonly labeled as the "pain matrix" and thought to be preferentially involved in the perception of pain. Despite the fact that this "pain matrix" has been used extensively to build models of where and how nociception is processed in the human brain, convincing experimental evidence demonstrating that this network is specifically related to nociception is lacking. The aim of the present study was to determine whether there is at least a subset of the "pain matrix" that responds uniquely to nociceptive somatosensory stimulation. ⋯ In a second experiment, we compared these multimodal activities to the fMRI responses elicited by auditory stimuli presented using an oddball paradigm. We found that the spatial distribution of the responses elicited by novel non-target and novel target auditory stimuli resembled closely that of the multimodal responses identified in the first experiment. Taken together, these findings suggest that the largest part of the fMRI responses elicited by phasic nociceptive stimuli reflects non nociceptive-specific cognitive processes.