Abstract
Pain empathy can be evoked by multiple cues, particularly observation of acute pain inflictions or facial expressions of pain. Previous studies suggest that these cues commonly activate the insula and anterior cingulate, yet vicarious pain encompasses pain-specific responses as well as unspecific processes (e.g. arousal) and overlapping activations are not sufficient to determine process-specific shared neural representations. We employed multivariate pattern analyses to fMRI data acquired during observation of noxious stimulation of body limbs (NS) and painful facial expressions (FE) and found spatially and functionally similar cross-modality (NS versus FE) whole-brain vicarious pain-predictive patterns. Further analyses consistently identified shared neural representations in the bilateral mid-insula. The vicarious pain patterns were not sensitive to respond to non-painful high-arousal negative stimuli but predicted self-experienced thermal pain. Finally, a domain-general vicarious pain pattern predictive of self-experienced pain but not arousal was developed. Our findings demonstrate shared pain-associated neural representations of vicarious pain.
Highlights
Pain empathy, the capacity to resonate with, relate to, and share others’ pain, is an essential part of human experience
Affective ratings of the stimuli in an independent sample confirmed that both sets of painful stimuli were rated as considerably more painful compared to their respective control stimuli, both in terms of recognizing and sharing pain, and were rated as more arousing and negative
Several studies have explored the neural underpinnings of vicarious pain in humans and suggested overlapping univariate Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activations in the anterior cingulate and insular cortices across different vicarious pain induction procedures
Summary
The capacity to resonate with, relate to, and share others’ pain, is an essential part of human experience. Among other functions, it motivates helping and cooperative behaviors and aids in learning to avoid harmful situations. While stimuli depicting the noxious stimulation of body limbs [i.e. observation of noxious stimulation (NS) induced vicarious pain (NS vicarious pain)] provide objective cues about the sensory component of the observed pain, the observation of facial expressions of pain [i.e. facial expressions induced vicarious pain (FE vicarious pain)] is considered more subjective and indirect as the pain experience of the expresser needs to be interpreted by the observer (Hadjistavropoulos et al, 2011; Vachon-Presseau et al, 2012). Vachon-Presseau et al, 2012 demonstrated that NS vicarious pain increased activity in core regions of the mirror neuron system, inferior frontal and posterior regions engaged in coding sensory-somatic information
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