Abstract
A large number of neuroimaging studies have shown neural overlaps between first-hand experiences of pain and the perception of pain in others. This shared neural representation of vicarious pain is thought to involve both affective and sensorimotor systems. A number of individual factors are thought to modulate the cerebral response to other's pain. The goal of this study was to investigate the impact of psychopathic traits on the relation between sensorimotor resonance to other's pain and self-reported empathy. Our group has previously shown that a steady-state response to non-painful stimulation is modulated by the observation of other people's bodily pain. This change in somatosensory response was interpreted as a form of somatosensory gating (SG). Here, using the same technique, SG was compared between two groups of 15 young adult males: one scoring very high on a self-reported measure of psychopathic traits [60.8 ± 4.98; Levenson's Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (LSRP)] and one scoring very low (42.7 ± 2.94). The results showed a significantly greater reduction of SG to pain observation for the high psychopathic traits group compared to the low psychopathic traits group. SG to pain observation was positively correlated with affective and interpersonal facet of psychopathy in the whole sample. The high psychopathic traits group also reported lower empathic concern (EC) scores than the low psychopathic traits group. Importantly, primary psychopathy, as assessed by the LSRP, mediated the relation between EC and SG to pain observation. Together, these results suggest that increase somatosensory resonance to other's pain is not exclusively explained by trait empathy and may be linked to other personality dimensions, such as psychopathic traits.
Highlights
Does vicariously experiencing someone else’s pain help us understand and care about the distress this person might be feeling? Over the last decade, a large number of studies in healthy and clinical populations have used the representation of other people’s pain as a means to investigate the different dimensions of empathy
This shared neural representations between the perception of pain in self and other has been interpreted as the result of an automatic resonance mechanism (Jackson et al, 2006) that can be best described as the lower-level of a vicarious pain response on which higher order process operate to develop empathy (Han et al, 2009; Vachon-Presseau et al, 2011)
Analyses performed on pain intensity ratings confirmed the expected significant effect for the main effects of Condition [F(1, 28) = 160.7, p < 0.001] whereas no significant effect was observed for Group [F(1, 28) = 0.21, p = 0.657] nor their interaction [F(1, 28) = 1.19, p = 0.283]
Summary
Does vicariously experiencing someone else’s pain help us understand and care about the distress this person might be feeling? Over the last decade, a large number of studies in healthy and clinical populations have used the representation of other people’s pain as a means to investigate the different dimensions of empathy. Neuroimaging studies on pain observation have revealed a considerable overlap between cerebral regions involved in the direct experience of pain and its perception in others (e.g., Morrison et al, 2004; Singer et al, 2004; Jackson et al, 2005), suggesting the existence of a neuronal pathway implicated in the elaboration of representations that reflect our own responses to pain to understand how the pain of others feels (see Jackson et al, 2006; Lamm et al, 2011 for reviews) This shared neural representations between the perception of pain in self and other has been interpreted as the result of an automatic resonance mechanism (Jackson et al, 2006) that can be best described as the lower-level of a vicarious pain response on which higher order process operate to develop empathy (Han et al, 2009; Vachon-Presseau et al, 2011)
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