Your pain or mine? Common and distinct neural systems supporting the perception of pain in self and other

Abstract

Humans possess a remarkable capacity to understand the suffering of others. Cognitive neuroscience theories of empathy suggest that this capacity is supported by 'shared representations' of self and other. Consistent with this notion, a number of studies have found that perceiving others in pain and experiencing pain oneself recruit overlapping neural systems. Perception of pain in each of these conditions, however, may also cause unique patterns of activation, that may reveal more about the processing steps involved in each type of pain. To address this issue, we examined neural activity while participants experienced heat pain and watched videos of other individuals experiencing injuries. Results demonstrated (i) that both tasks activated anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula, consistent with prior work; (ii) whereas self-pain activated anterior and mid insula regions implicated in interoception and nociception, other pain activated frontal, premotor, parietal and amygdala regions implicated in emotional learning and processing social cues; and (iii) that levels of trait anxiety correlated with activity in rostral lateral prefrontal cortex during perception of other pain but not during self-pain. Taken together, these data support the hypothesis that perception of pain in self and other, while sharing some neural commonalities, differ in their recruitment of systems specifically associated with decoding and learning about internal or external cues.

A neural link between affective understanding and interpersonal attraction

“…The second important finding of the current study is that both the observer's subjective confidence and neural confidence signals in the mOFC reflected the level of correspondence between patterns of neural activity elicited in the anterior insula during emotion observation and those associated with the observer's own emotional experience (NOE matching). This extends previous studies that observed overlapping activity in the anterior insula when participants experienced and observed pain (46,47), disgust (30), or joy (32) and more recent studies that used MVPA to examine whether one's own pain and emotional experience and another person's pain and emotional experience are encoded in similar patterns of neural activity (37,38).…”

Learning About Pain From Others: An Observational Learning Account

“…The social models also had an impact upon autonomic activity and psychophysical measures of sensory processing of painful events 15 Furthermore, fMRI analyses showed that the amygdala was involved both during learning (observation phase) and expression (test phase) of learned fear. The authors interpreted these findings as evidence for the similarity in neural processes underlying direct and observational fear learning, even though research examining both peripheral autonomic activity and brain imaging demonstrates only partial similarity with the differences having major theoretical importance 14,41,60,72 . While these and other studies provide substantial evidence of a powerful impact of observing others in pain on neurophysiological activity in observers, the broader mechanisms whereby observational learning plays a crucial role in establishing pain-related responses remain relatively uninvestigated; no systematic research is available examining cognitive and affective mechanisms (e.g., changes in beliefs about pain and attitudes toward pain) underlying the effects on behavior, including the moderators of these effects.…”

Neural correlates of admiration and compassion

“…Interestingly, neural mechanisms of physical pain (involving especially the dorsal anterior cingulate) have been suggested to underlie the experience of social exclusion or loss (15)(16)(17)(18), and recent research has established important shared neural mechanisms between the direct experience of pleasant and unpleasant physical sensations such as pain, noxious odors, and pleasant tastes and the ability to recognize these experiences in others (e.g., 19,[20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. It has not been established, however, how neural mechanisms used in empathy for another's physical situation may be involved in emotional reactions to another person's psychological state, either admirable or painful.…”