ArticlePloS one2015
Mirroring pain in the brain: emotional expression versus motor imitation.
Article in PloS one, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 27 citations in OpenAlex.
- The shared neural substrates of emotional mimicry and emotional contagion: an activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis and meta-analytic connectivity modeling analysis.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Pooled it
- A meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies on pain empathy: investigating the role of visual information and observers' perspective.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2019Pooled it
- Top-down influence of the inferior frontal gyrus on motor cortex excitability during pain empathy.Communications biology · 2026Article
- A causal and dissociable role for the right inferior frontal gyrus in empathy for physical and social pain.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Action units of facial expressions in emotional contagion.iScience · 2026Article
- Intracranial EEG signals disentangle multi-areal neural dynamics of vicarious pain perception.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Functional Brain Changes in Younger Population of Cervical Spondylosis Patients with Chronic Neck Pain.Journal of pain research · 2024Article
- Brain responses to the vicarious facilitation of pain by facial expressions of pain and fear.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Article
- Characterization of spatiotemporal dynamics of binary and graded tonic pain in humans using intracranial recordings.PloS one · 2023Article
- Article
- Effects of Sub-threshold Transcutaneous Auricular Vagus Nerve Stimulation on Cingulate Cortex and Insula Resting-state Functional Connectivity.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Article
- Abnormal Dynamics of Functional Connectivity Density Associated With Chronic Neck Pain.Frontiers in molecular neuroscience · 2022Article
- Visceromotor roots of aesthetic evaluation of pain in art: an fMRI study.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Article
- Early alterations of cortical thickness and gyrification in migraine without aura: a retrospective MRI study in pediatric patients.The journal of headache and pain · 2021Article
- Probing the role of the right inferior frontal gyrus during Pain-Related empathy processing: Evidence from fMRI and TMS.Human brain mapping · 2021Article
- Dynamic brain-to-brain concordance and behavioral mirroring as a mechanism of the patient-clinician interaction.Science advances · 2020Article
- Structural neuroimaging findings in migraine patients with restless legs syndrome.Neuroradiology · 2020Article
- Article
- Brain pathways of pain empathy activated by pained facial expressions: a meta-analysis of fMRI using the activation likelihood estimation method.Neural regeneration research · 2019Article
- Changes in spontaneous overt motor execution immediately after observing others' painful action: two pilot studies.Experimental brain research · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Perception of pain in others via facial expressions has been shown to involve brain areas responsive to self-pain, biological motion, as well as both performed and observed motor actions. Here, we investigated the involvement of these different regions during emotional and motor mirroring of pain expressions using a two-task paradigm, and including both observation and execution of the expressions. BOLD responses were measured as subjects watched video clips showing different intensities of pain expression and, after a variable delay, either expressed the amount of pain they perceived in the clips (pain task), or imitated the facial movements (movement task). In the pain task condition, pain coding involved overlapping activation across observation and execution in the anterior cingulate cortex, supplementary motor area, inferior frontal gyrus/anterior insula, and the inferior parietal lobule, and a pain-related increase (pain vs. neutral) in the anterior cingulate cortex/supplementary motor area, the right inferior frontal gyrus, and the postcentral gyrus. The 'mirroring' response was stronger in the inferior frontal gyrus and middle temporal gyrus/superior temporal sulcus during the pain task, and stronger in the inferior parietal lobule in the movement task. These results strongly suggest that while motor mirroring may contribute to the perception of pain expressions in others, interpreting these expressions in terms of pain content draws more heavily on networks involved in the perception of affective meaning.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.