Journal
ELIFE
Volume 9, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
ELIFE SCIENCES PUBLICATIONS LTD
DOI: 10.7554/eLife.56929
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Funding
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [91632117, 31700998, 31530032]
- National Institute of Mental Health [R01 MH116026]
- National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering [R01EB026549]
- National Key Research and Development Program of China [2018YFA0701400]
- Fundamental Research Funds for Central Universities [ZYGX2015Z002]
- Science, Innovation and Technology Department of the Sichuan Province [2018JY0001]
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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) wholebrain 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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