Emotional Mirrors in the Rat’s Anterior Cingulate Cortex. Carrillo et al.

How do the emotions of others affect us? The human anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) responds while experiencing pain in the self and witnessing pain in others, but the underlying cellular mechanisms remain poorly understood. Here we show the rat ACC (area 24) contains neurons responding when a rat experiences pain as triggered by a laser and while witnessing another rat receive footshocks. Most of these neurons do not respond to a fear conditioned tone (CS). Deactivating this region reduces freezing while witnessing footshocks to others but not while hearing the CS. A decoder trained on spike counts while witnessing footshocks to another rat can decode stimulus intensity both while witnessing pain in another and while experiencing the pain first-hand. Mirror-like neurons thus exist in the ACC that encode the pain of others in a code shared with first-hand pain experience. A smaller population of neurons responded to witnessing footshocks to others and while hearing the CS but not while experiencing laser triggered pain. These differential responses suggest that the ACC may contain channels that map the distress of another animal onto a mosaic of pain and fear sensitive channels in the observer. More experiments are necessary to determine whether painfulness and fearfulness in particular or differences in arousal or salience are responsible for these differential responses

The data is organized based by the figures included in the paper, one folder per figure. Each figure contains a text file that explains in detail the organization of the data files and matlab scripts where applicable.
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他人情绪如何影响我们？人类前扣带皮层（ACC）在体验自我疼痛以及目睹他人疼痛时均会作出反应，但其潜在的细胞机制仍不甚明了。在本研究中，我们发现大鼠的ACC（区域24）包含一组神经元，当大鼠因激光刺激而体验疼痛或目睹其他大鼠接受足部电击时，这些神经元会被激活。其中大多数神经元对条件性恐惧声音（CS）无反应。该区域的去激活能够减少目睹他人足部电击时的僵直反应，但并不会影响对CS的听觉反应。通过对目睹其他大鼠足部电击时神经元放电计数进行训练的解码器，能够在目睹他人疼痛以及亲身经历疼痛时解码刺激强度。因此，ACC中存在镜像神经元，这些神经元能够以与亲身疼痛体验共享的编码方式对他人疼痛进行编码。另外一小部分神经元对目睹他人足部电击以及听到CS有反应，但不在激光触发疼痛时产生反应。这些差异性的反应表明，ACC可能含有将他人痛苦映射至观察者疼痛和恐惧敏感通道的映射通道。为了确定这些差异性反应是否由特定的疼痛或恐惧感、唤醒程度或显著性差异引起，还需要进行更多的实验。数据组织基于论文中包含的图表，每个图表对应一个文件夹。每个图表中包含一个文本文件，详细解释数据文件的组成以及相关的MATLAB脚本。