Another’s Pain in my Brain: Clarifying the Specificity of the Effects of Placebo Analgesia on First-Hand and Empathy for Pain

The shared representations account of empathy suggests that sharing other people’s emotions relies on neural processes similar to those engaged when experiencing such emotions oneself. Recent research corroborated this account by showing that experimentally reducing first-hand pain by means of placebo analgesia also resulted in reduced empathy for pain, and decreased activation in the shared neural networks, namely the affective-motivational component of the pain matrix. However, the role of the more basic sensory-discriminative component in the context of empathy is still not clear. The present project therefore aims to explore the role of the somatosensory part of pain processing during empathy for another’s pain and its modulation by placebo analgesia by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a tailored experimental paradigm.

共享表征的共情理论认为，共享他人的情感依赖于与自身体验此类情感时相似的神经过程。近期的研究通过实验表明，通过安慰剂镇痛减轻个体亲身经历的疼痛，也导致了共情疼痛感的降低，以及共享神经网络中情感动机成分的激活度减少。然而，在共情情境下，更为基础的感觉辨别成分的作用尚不明确。因此，本项研究旨在通过功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）和定制化的实验范式，探究在共情他人疼痛的过程中，痛觉处理中的躯体感觉部分的作用及其由安慰剂镇痛所调节的情况。