Trial reportThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2015
Reduction of empathy for pain by placebo analgesia suggests functional equivalence of empathy and first-hand emotion experience.
Trial report in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 52 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
52 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Pain-related evoked potentials with concentric surface electrodes in patients and healthy subjects: a systematic review.Brain structure & function · 2023Pooled it
- The Influence of Placebo Effect on Craving and Cognitive Performance in Alcohol, Caffeine, or Nicotine Consumers: A Systematic Review.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2020Pooled it
- Shared effects of the opioid antagonist naltrexone on first-hand and empathic pain.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Trial
- Effects of compassion training on brain responses to suffering others.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Trial
- Beyond Sharing Unpleasant Affect-Evidence for Pain-Specific Opioidergic Modulation of Empathy for Pain.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2021Trial
- From painkiller to empathy killer: acetaminophen (paracetamol) reduces empathy for pain.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2016Trial
- Placebo analgesia and its opioidergic regulation suggest that empathy for pain is grounded in self pain.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2015Trial
- Placebo Analgesia Does Not Generalize From Pain to Interoceptive Abilities: A Preregistered Exploratory Study.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Empathy for pain persists across live two-way video interactions and viewing of prerecorded videos.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- The analgesic effect and neural mechanism of spicy food intake.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Endogenous opioid receptor system mediates costly altruism in the human brain.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Nearsighted empathy: exploring the effect of empathy on distance perception, with eye movements as modulators.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Enduring maternal brain changes and their role in mediating motherhood's impact on well-being.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Intact painful sensation but enhanced non-painful sensation in individuals with autistic traits.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Article
- Empathy from dissimilarity: Multivariate pattern analysis of neural activity during observation of somatosensory experience.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Negative expectations (nocebo phenomenon) in clinical interventions: A scoping review.Journal of education and health promotion · 2024Article
- Article
- A pill as a quick solution: association between painkiller intake, empathy, and prosocial behavior.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Cognitive exertion affects the appraisal of one's own and other people's pain.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Autistic Traits and Empathy for Others' Pain Among the General Population: Test of the Mediating Effects of First-Hand Pain Sensitivity.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Previous research in social neuroscience has consistently shown that empathy for pain recruits brain areas that are also activated during the first-hand experience of pain. This has been interpreted as evidence that empathy relies upon neural processes similar to those underpinning the first-hand experience of emotions. However, whether such overlapping neural activations imply that equivalent neural functions are engaged by empathy and direct emotion experiences remains to be demonstrated. We induced placebo analgesia, a phenomenon specifically modulating the first-hand experience of pain, to test whether this also reduces empathy for pain. Subjective and neural measures of pain and empathy for pain were collected using self-report and event-related potentials (ERPs) while participants underwent painful electrical stimulation or witnessed that another person was undergoing such stimulation. Self-report showed decreased empathy during placebo analgesia, and this was mirrored by reduced amplitudes of the pain-related P2, an ERP component indexing neural computations related to the affective-motivational component of pain. Moreover, these effects were specific for pain, as self-report and ERP measures of control conditions unrelated to pain were not affected by placebo analgesia. Together, the present results suggest that empathy seems to rely on neural processes that are (partially) functionally equivalent to those engaged by first-hand emotion experiences. Moreover, they imply that analgesics may have the unwanted side effect of reducing empathic resonance and concern for others.
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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.