Article
Neural Correlates of Empathy for Physical and Psychological Pain Vera Flasbeck and Martin Brüne LWL University Hospital, Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Preventive Medicine, Division of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry and Psychiatric Preventive Medicine, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany
Abstract: Empathy is known as the ability to share and understand someone else’s feelings. Previous research has either addressed the neural correlates of empathy for pain or social exclusion, but no study has examined empathy for physical and psychological (social) pain simultaneously. Forty-seven participants completed our novel “Social Interaction Empathy Task” during electroencephalogram (EEG) recording. Participants had to observe and rate the intensity of physical and psychological pain in social interactions from a first- and thirdperson perspective. At the behavioral level, subjects did not differentiate between the perspectives and rated physically painful scenarios as more painful than psychologically painful and neutral interactions. Psychologically painful pictures were also rated as more painful than neutral pictures. Analysis of event-related potentials (ERPs) revealed an early and a late response with a higher ERP response to physical and psychological pain compared to neutral interactions. Moreover, a significant difference emerged between the two dimensions of painful interactions. Furthermore, we found that the activity over frontal regions for discrimination of painful interactions was lateralized to the right hemisphere. Moreover, we detected significant correlations with the self-rated perspective taking ability. This suggests the psychological and physical pain qualities are processed differently but both are related to empathic traits. We further suggest that the right hemisphere may be specifically involved in the processing of empathy-related tasks. Keywords: empathy, ERP, physical pain, social exclusion, perspective taking
Empathy is a complex mental state which enables us to share and to understand someone else’s emotions (Gonzalez-Liencres, Shamay-Tsoory, & Brüne, 2013; Shamay-Tsoory, 2011; Shamay-Tsoory, Aharon-Peretz, & Perry, 2009). It requires an affective component to match the emotional state of someone else and a cognitive component involving the capacity to differentiate self from others (for reviews, see Gonzalez-Liencres et al., 2013; Singer, 2006). Empathy for another’s pain has become a common tool for the investigation of empathic abilities in human beings. Neuroimaging research has revealed overlapping brain areas that are activated during empathy for another’s pain and the first-hand experience of pain, whereby these affective parts of the “pain matrix” comprise the bilateral anterior insular cortex and medial/ anterior cingulate cortex (ACC; Botvinick et al., 2005; Jackson, Brunet, Meltzoff, & Decety, 2006; Lamm, Decety, & Singer, 2011; Singer et al., 2004). Moreover, the activity of the affective brain regions correlates with the judgment of pain intensity and with self-rated empathic abilities (Jackson, Meltzoff, & Decety, 2005; Saarela et al., 2007). Several studies have tried to differentiate between a firstperson perspective and a third-person perspective during the empathy task. That is, individuals were asked to Journal of Psychophysiology (2019), 33(1), 54–63 https://doi.org/10.1027/0269-8803/a000205
indicate how they would feel in the observed situation (i.e., first-person perspective, FPP) and how the observed character would feel (i.e., third-person perspective, TPP). While some studies reported differences between the perspectives with a higher pain rating and faster reactions in the FPP (Li & Han, 2010; van der Heiden, Scherpiet, Konicar, Birbaumer, & Veit, 2013), other studies did not find any difference. For example, Jackson et al. (2006) reported that pain empathy evoked overlapping brain activity in both perspectives, but also a higher involvement of the secondary somatosensory cortex, ACC, and insula in the FPP and higher recruitment of the right temporoparietal junction in the TPP condition (Jackson et al., 2006). In addition, Abu-Akel, Palgi, Klein, Decety, and Shamay-Tsoory (2015) examined empathy for pain in both FPP and TPP under oxytocin treatment and could not detect differences between the perspectives in the placebo group. However, after administration of oxytocin participants rated the pain as more intense in the TPP compared to the FPP suggesting a modulatory effect of oxytocin on empathy (Abu-Akel et al., 2015). Another approach to investigate empathy for pain and its temporal dynamics entailed the analysis of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Fan and Han were the first to Ó 2017 Hogrefe Publishing
