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Empathy

Your pain in my brain

Nature Reviews Psychology volume 2, page 331 (2023)Cite this article

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Pain is ubiquitous in life — we feel it when we accidentally hit our elbow on the door frame while rushing to the next meeting. But we also feel pain in the absence of first-hand experiences — for example, when we observe a colleague hitting his or her elbow. Experiencing the pain of others is known as vicarious pain or empathy.

The theory of shared representations posits that people experience and share the pain of others by activating brain regions used for processing first-hand pain and thereby simulating another’s pain in themselves. Some studies suggest that there are similarities between first-hand pain and empathy for pain, whereas other studies identify fundamental differences between the two. More specifically, there is evidence for overlapping brain activation during first-hand pain and empathy for pain in affective–motivational brain regions that process the subjective evaluation of pain, such as the anterior insula and midcingulate cortex. By contrast, some studies find that activity in regions such as the somatosensory cortex that process basic physical pain representations (such as location, duration, or timing) is exclusive to first-hand pain. This mismatch between evidence for shared and distinct neural representations sparked a huge debate about which exact brain regions are shared between representations of first-hand pain and empathy for pain. This debate, in turn, led Keysers, Kaas and Gazzola to carefully assess and summarize the evidence for how the somatosensory cortex is involved in vicarious emotions. The authors provide a vast array of evidence (in contexts ranging from animals to humans, from touch to pain and from behavioural to neural) that somatosensation does have a critical role in perceiving and reacting to social stimuli.

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Original article

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  • Hartmann, H. et al. Another’s pain in my brain: no evidence that placebo analgesia affects the sensory-discriminative component in empathy for pain. NeuroImage 224, 117397 (2021)

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  1. Department of Neurology, Center for Translational Neuro- and Behavioral Sciences, University Hospital Essen, Essen, Germany

    Helena Hartmann

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  1. Helena Hartmann
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Correspondence to Helena Hartmann.

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Hartmann, H. Your pain in my brain. Nat Rev Psychol 2, 331 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-023-00189-6

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