Our new study “Empathic pain evoked by sensory and emotional-communicative cues share common and process-specific neural representation” published in eLife suggests that pain empathy evoked by observation of acute pain inflictions and facial expressions of pain share common and pain-specific neural representations. In addition to traditional univariate analyses, we employed extensive multivariate pattern analyses, which highlighted common representations centered largely on the bilateral mid-insula. In a further validation step, we showed that the domain-general vicarious pain pattern did not respond to non-painful high-arousal negative stimuli but predicted self-experienced thermal pain.
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 encompass 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.
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