ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2016
Social hierarchy modulates neural responses of empathy for pain.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Upward and downward comparisons across monetary and status domains.Human brain mapping · 2020Pooled 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
- Social rank modulates empathic pain via Galntl6Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Neural and behavioral signatures of error monitoring are differentially modulated by social hierarchy and trial type.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Diminished neural responses for greater numbers of lives at risk and lives lost in foreign countries.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Disrupted self-referential processing and empathy-based interventions in mental disorders: neural mechanisms, cognitive biases, and therapeutic integration.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Review
- Scarcity mindset facilitates empathy for social pain and prosocial intention: behavioral and neural evidences.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- An fMRI study on how decisions are influenced by affective evaluations from different social hierarchical positions.Cognitive neurodynamics · 2024Article
- Transcranial direct current stimulation suggests a causal role of the medial prefrontal cortex in learning social hierarchy.Communications biology · 2024Article
- The impact of social hierarchies on neural response to feedback evaluations after advice giving.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- A Brain-To-Brain Mechanism for Social Transmission of Threat Learning.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2023Article
- On power and its corrupting effects: the effects of power on human behavior and the limits of accountability systems.Communicative & integrative biology · 2023Review
- Experience of a hierarchical relationship between a pair of mice specifically influences their affective empathy toward each other.Genes, brain, and behavior · 2022Article
- Effect of doctor-patient news-induced moral judgments on pain empathy for doctors and patients in China.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
- Establishing a Counter-Empathy Processing Model: Evidence from Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Article
- Prelimbic cortex glucocorticoid receptors regulate the stress-mediated inhibition of pain contagion in male mice.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2021Article
- Skin Color and Attractiveness Modulate Empathy for Pain: An Event-Related Potential Study.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- The Neural Representational Space of Social Memory.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2019Article
- Social Mindfulness Shown by Individuals With Higher Status Is More Pronounced in Our Brain: ERP Evidence.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2019Article
- The Role of Social Power in Neural Responses to Others' Pain.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Recent evidence indicates that empathic responses to others' pain are modulated by various situational and individual factors. However, few studies have examined how empathy and underlying brain functions are modulated by social hierarchies, which permeate human society with an enormous impact on social behavior and cognition. In this study, social hierarchies were established based on incidental skill in a perceptual task in which all participants were mediumly ranked. Afterwards, participants were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging while watching inferior-status or superior-status targets receiving painful or non-painful stimulation. The results revealed that painful stimulation applied to inferior-status targets induced higher activations in the anterior insula (AI) and anterior medial cingulate cortex (aMCC), whereas these empathic brain activations were significantly attenuated in response to superior-status targets' pain. Further, this neural empathic bias to inferior-status targets was accompanied by stronger functional couplings of AI with brain regions important in emotional processing (i.e. thalamus) and cognitive control (i.e. middle frontal gyrus). Our findings indicate that emotional sharing with others' pain is shaped by relative positions in a social hierarchy such that underlying empathic neural responses are biased toward inferior-status compared with superior-status individuals.
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