Pain and social decision-making: New insights from the social framing effect

Abstract

This paper focuses on the social function of painful experience as revealed by recent studies on social decision-making. Observing others suffering from physical pain evokes empathic reactions that can lead to prosocial behavior (e.g., helping others at a cost to oneself), which might be regarded as the social value of pain derived from evolution. Feelings of guilt may also be elicited when one takes responsibility for another’s pain. These social emotions play a significant role in various cognitive processes and may affect behavioral preferences. In addition, the influence of others’ pain on decision-making is highly sensitive to social context. Combining neuroimaging techniques with a novel decision paradigm, we found that when asking participants to trade-off personal benefits against providing help to other people, verbally describing the causal relationship between their decision and other people’s pain (i.e., framing) significantly changed participants’ preferences. This social framing effect was associated with neural activation in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), which is a brain area that is important in social cognition and in social emotions. Further, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on this region successfully modulated the magnitude of the social framing effect. These findings add to the knowledge about the role of perception of others’ pain in our social life.

Impact Factors of Empathy in Mainland Chinese Youth

“…Instead, we focused on information that is presented on the national ID and student cards (e.g., ethnicity and study major), and tried to avoid collecting information that might put some youths out of their comfort zone or make them feel self-abased. Fourth, the current study focused on empathy for emotions (measured by IRI scores), while empathy for pain (e.g., social and physical pain; see Zhang et al, 2019) is also an important social and medical skill (see Gu et al, 2019). A future investigation of empathy for pain in Mainland Chinese youth, for a cross-study comparison with the current findings, would be worthwhile.…”

ERP Indicators of Self-Pain and Other Pain Reductions due to Placebo Analgesia Responding: The Moderating Role of the Fight-Flight-Freeze System

“…We believe that empathy for pain would be better conceptualized using the differentiation of pain's sensory and emotional components. Research has also shown that observing others suffering from physical pain evokes empathic reactions, including emotions and feelings that can lead to prosocial behavior and might be regarded as the social value of pain [82]. Moreover, considering that empathy for unpleasantness is related to the activity of brain regions that are different from those involved in empathy for pain [83], we urge researchers to further study placebo-induced modulation on the empathy for pain and unpleasantness responses.…”

The sensitivity of third party punishment to the framing effect and its brain mechanism

“…Our task design combined the "social framing" task with third-party punishment. The task was developed and successfully applied in our recent studies (Gu et al, 2019;Liu et al, 2020; see also Aupperle et al, 2011;Crockett et al, 2014;FeldmanHall et al, 2015). Specifically, one participant plays as the decision-maker (player A) and her/his partner as the pain-taker (player B).…”