Emotional contagion of pain across different social cues shares common and process-specific neural representations

Abstract

Insular and anterior cingulate cortex activation across vicarious pain induction procedures suggests that they are core pain empathy nodes. However, pain empathic responses encompass emotional contagion as well as unspecific arousal and overlapping functional activations are not sufficient to determine shared and process-specific neural representations. We employed multivariate pattern analyses to fMRI data acquired during physical and affective vicarious pain induction and found spatially and functionally similar cross-modality (physical versus affective) whole-brain vicarious pain-predictive patterns. Further analyses consistently identified shared neural representations in the bilateral mid-insula. Mid-insula vicarious pain patterns were not sensitive to capture non-painful arousing negative stimuli but predicted self-experienced pain during thermal stimulation, suggesting process-specific representation of emotional contagion for pain. Finally, a domain-general vicarious pain pattern which predicted vicarious as well as selfexperienced pain was developed. Our findings demonstrate a generalizable neural expression of vicarious pain and suggest that the mid-insula encodes emotional contagion for pain.

Healthcare experience affects pain-specific responses to others’ suffering in the anterior insula

“…Fan et al, 2011;Jauniaux et al, 2019;Kogler et al, 2020;Lamm et al, 2011;Schurz et al, 2021;Timmers et al, 2018). Remarkably, these activity patterns are highly similar to those measured when pain is experienced directly by oneself (Berluti et al, 2020;Braboszcz et al, 2017;Corradi-Dell'Acqua et al, 2011O'Connell et al, 2019;Qiao-Tasserit et al, 2018;Wagner et al, 2020;Zhou et al, 2020), and they are attenuated by those same analgesic procedures that regulate first-hand nociception, such as placebo or hypnosis (Braboszcz et al, 2017;Rütgen et al, 2015Rütgen et al, , 2021. These results suggest that others' pain is at least partly processed in an embodied (or empathetic) fashion, that is, by simulating its somatic and affective properties on one's own body (Bastiaansen et al, 2009;Bernhardt & Singer, 2012).…”

“…To maximize the comparability with our "Handedness" task, we considered two models derived from previous fMRI work measuring brain responses to the sight of injured limbs: Zhou-NS2020 (Zhou et al, 2020) and Krishnan2016 (Krishnan et al, 2016) (see Methods). Both models aim at predicting the same underlying construct of pain, but do so by relying on the activity of different brain structures: whereas Zhou-NS2020 relies strongly (but not exclusively) on the middle-anterior insula (Zhou et al, 2020) (Figure 3), Krishnan2016 is grounded on a more widespread network involving occipital, parietal, medio-prefrontal, and subcortical structures (Krishnan et al, 2016).…”

“…To maximize the comparability with our "Handedness" task, we considered two models derived from previous fMRI work measuring brain responses to the sight of injured limbs: Zhou-NS2020 (Zhou et al, 2020) and Krishnan2016 (Krishnan et al, 2016) (see Methods). Both models aim at predicting the same underlying construct of pain, but do so by relying on the activity of different brain structures: whereas Zhou-NS2020 relies strongly (but not exclusively) on the middle-anterior insula (Zhou et al, 2020) (Figure 3), Krishnan2016 is grounded on a more widespread network involving occipital, parietal, medio-prefrontal, and subcortical structures (Krishnan et al, 2016). When applying these models to our data from the "Handedness" task, we found that both predicted a significant vicarious pain response to the sight of injured hands 19 in Controls (PF vs. cPF; t(13) ≥ 2.33, p ≤ 0.036), demonstrating a reasonable generalizability of these neural patterns to our dataset (at least for individuals with no healthcare training).…”

“…We also submitted data from the "Handedness" task to two multivariate neural models predictive of vicarious pain from brain activity. To maximize the comparability with our experiment, we choose models derived from previous datasets in which individuals were shown pictures of limb injuries (Krishnan et al, 2016;Zhou et al, 2020). The first was developed by Zhou and colleagues (2020) (hereafter Zhou-NS2020), and the second by Krishnan and colleagues (2016) Qiao-Tasserit et al, 2018).…”

Medial prefrontal activity at encoding determines enhanced recognition of threatening faces after 1.5 years

“…A total of 102 healthy, young right-handed Chinese students participated in this study which was part of a large-scale fMRI project (e.g., Li et al, 2018;Liu et al, 2019;Xu et al, 2020;Zhou et al, 2020). Following initial quality assessment data from N = 83 subjects was included in the final analyses (40 males; mean age = 21.40 ± 2.40 years, age range: 18-30).…”