Viewing facial expressions of pain engages cortical areas involved in the direct experience of pain

Embodied Simulation Theory: Imagination and Narrative

“…Brain and cognitive resources typically used for one purpose are reused for another purpose. For example, witnessing someone else expressing a given emotion (e.g., disgust, pain) or undergoing a given sensation (e.g., touch) recruits some of the visceromotor (e.g., anterior insula) and sensorimotor (e.g., second somatosensory area, SII; ventral premotor cortex) brain areas activated when one experiences the same emotion (Botvinick et al, 2005;Jackson, Meltzoff, & Decety, 2005;Wickers et al, 2003) or sensation (Blakemore, Bristow, Bird, Frith, & Ward, 2005;Ebisch et al, 2008;Keysers et al, 2004), respectively. Other cortical regions, though, are exclusively recruited for one's own and not for others' emotions (Jabbi, Bastiaansen, & Keysers, 2008), or are activated for one's own tactile sensation, but they are actually deactivated when observing someone else being touched (Ebisch et al, 2011).…”

When you dislike patients, pain is taken less seriously

“…Videos of the patients were then presented to healthy volunteers (observers) who rated patients' pain. We expect observers (1) to rate the pain of liked patients as more intense than the pain of disliked patients (primary outcome; pain ratings on VAS), (2) to be more sensitive to pain expressed by liked patients than to pain expressed by disliked patients (sensitivity; possible mechanism), and (3) to have a higher tendency to ascribe pain to liked than to disliked patients (response bias; possible mechanism).…”

“…These results extend -on a behavioral level -neurological findings in the context of sensitivity for pain. It has been shown, for example, that the neural network activated in an observer of someone in pain, is highly similar to the neural network activated in the person in pain himself [2]. This perception-action coupling -the activation of a representation of a behavior that is observed in someone else -is less pronounced when observers dislike the observed person in pain [33].…”

Hearing others’ pain: neural activity related to empathy

“…Several studies have shown that the perception of pain in others activates only the affective components of the pain matrix, such as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and insula (Botvinick et al, 2005;Saarela et al, 2007;Singer et al, 2004). For instance, in the study of Saarela et al, participants viewed emotional facial expressions of disgust or pain.…”