Departmental Papers (ASC)
Document Type
Technical Report
Date of this Version
4-2013
Publication Source
PLoS ONE
Volume
8
Issue
4
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0063085
Abstract
People are often called upon to witness, and to empathize with, the pain and suffering of others. In the current study, we directly compared neural responses to others' physical pain and emotional suffering by presenting participants (n = 41) with 96 verbal stories, each describing a protagonist's physical and/or emotional experience, ranging from neutral to extremely negative. A separate group of participants rated “how much physical pain”, and “how much emotional suffering” the protagonist experienced in each story, as well as how “vivid and movie-like” the story was. Although ratings of Pain, Suffering and Vividness were positively correlated with each other across stories, item-analyses revealed that each scale was correlated with activity in distinct brain regions. Even within regions of the “Shared Pain network” identified using a separate data set, responses to others' physical pain and emotional suffering were distinct. More broadly, item analyses with continuous predictors provided a high-powered method for identifying brain regions associated with specific aspects of complex stimuli – like verbal descriptions of physical and emotional events.
Copyright/Permission Statement
© 2013 Bruneau et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Keywords
emotions, pain sensation, cingulate cortex, thalamus, prefrontal cortex, principal component analysis, behavior, neuroimaging
Recommended Citation
Bruneau, E., Dufour, N., & Saxe, R. (2013). How We Know It Hurts: Item Analysis of Written Narratives Reveals Distinct Neural Responses to Others' Physical Pain and Emotional Suffering. PLoS ONE, 8 (4), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0063085
Included in
Cognition and Perception Commons, Cognitive Psychology Commons, Graphic Communications Commons, Personality and Social Contexts Commons, Social Psychology Commons
Date Posted: 15 June 2018
This document has been peer reviewed.