Witnessing hateful people in pain modulates brain activity in regions associated with physical pain and reward

Abstract

How does witnessing a hateful person in pain compare to witnessing a likable person in pain? The current study compared the brain bases for how we perceive likable people in pain with those of viewing hateful people in pain. While social bonds are built through sharing the plight and pain of others in the name of empathy, viewing a hateful person in pain also has many potential ramifications. In this functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) study, Caucasian Jewish male participants viewed videos of (1) disliked, hateful, anti-Semitic individuals, and (2) liked, non-hateful, tolerant individuals in pain. The results showed that, compared with viewing liked people, viewing hateful people in pain elicited increased responses in regions associated with observation of physical pain (the insular cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and the somatosensory cortex), reward processing (the striatum), and frontal regions associated with emotion regulation. Functional connectivity analyses revealed connections between seed regions in the left ACC and right insular cortex with reward regions, the amygdala, and frontal regions associated with emotion regulation. These data indicate that regions of the brain active while viewing someone in pain may be more active in response to the danger or threat posed by witnessing the pain of a hateful individual more so than the desire to empathize with a likable person's pain.

Helping behavior induced by empathic concern attenuates anterior cingulate activation in response to others’ distress

“…Thus, the ACC acts as a neural alert system (Eisenberger & Lieberman, 2004), which might be associated with more general survival mechanisms . In line with a previous study showing that subjective feeling of hatred toward targets is accompanied by ACC activation when perceiving others' suffering (Fox, Sobhani, & Aziz-Zadeh, 2013), it is possible that the ACC represents aversive feelings (Menon & Uddin, 2010) aroused during both psychological and physical pain processing. In the present study, although the participants increased ball tosses to isolated players, the isolated players still did not receive any ball tosses from the other three players in the concern condition.…”

Empathy, Justice, and Moral Behavior

“…In support of this interpretation, one study reported that perceiving a hated person’s face, compared with that of a neutral person, elicited increased activity in the insula and ACC, and activity in these regions was correlated to the subjective rating of hate participants felt for the hated people (Zeki and Romaya 2008). Another fMRI study found greater activity in this pain network, including the aINS, ACC, and somatosensory cortex when Jewish participants viewed hateful (anti-Semitic) individuals compared with likable targets in pain (Fox, Sobhani, and Aziz-Zadeh 2013). Together, these studies demonstrate that increased activity in this pain network seems to be more related to increased salience and relevance of the pain-related cues rather than to increased empathy-related processing per se.…”

Individual differences in local gray matter density are associated with differences in affective and cognitive empathy

“…In contrast, when we observed another person in pain, initial findings suggested that only the affective components are vicariously experienced through activation of the insula and anterior cingulate cortex (Jackson et al, 2006;Singer et al, 2004;Lamm et al, 2011). More recent evidence suggests that somatosensory cortex may also be activated in response to perceiving another person in pain (Avenanti et al, 2005;Chen et al, 2012;Fox, et al, 2013;Marsh et al, 2013).…”