ArticleeLife2016
Somatic and vicarious pain are represented by dissociable multivariate brain patterns.
Article in eLife, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 126 papers, 4 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.
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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.
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Who cites it
126 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Parameter Space and Potential for Biomarker Development in 25 Years of fMRI Drug Cue Reactivity: A Systematic Review.JAMA psychiatry · 2024Pooled it
- Emotion processing in youths with conduct problems: an fMRI meta-analysis.Translational psychiatry · 2023Pooled it
- Placebo Effects on the Neurologic Pain Signature: A Meta-analysis of Individual Participant Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Data.JAMA neurology · 2018Pooled it
- Social comparison in the brain: A coordinate-based meta-analysis of functional brain imaging studies on the downward and upward comparisons.Human brain mapping · 2018Pooled it
- Affective theory of mind impairments linked with callous-unemotional traits implicate cognitive control: A pre-registered double-blind randomized controlled trial with a dual-task paradigm.Journal of affective disorders · 2025Trial
- Beyond Sharing Unpleasant Affect-Evidence for Pain-Specific Opioidergic Modulation of Empathy for Pain.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2021Trial
- One's Interoception Affects the Representation of Seeing Others' Pain: A Randomized Controlled qEEG Study.Pain research & management · 2021Trial
- Analgesic Effects Evoked by Real and Imagined Acupuncture: A Neuroimaging Study.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2019Trial
- Evidence for decreased Neurologic Pain Signature activation following thoracic spinal manipulation in healthy volunteers and participants with neck pain.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2019Trial
- Endogenous opioids regulate social threat learning in humans.Nature communications · 2017Trial
- Frontal-Brainstem Pathways Mediating Placebo Effects on Social Rejection.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2017Trial
- Modality-specific reactive and predictive responses in the human superior colliculus.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- A predictive corticospinal model for pain perception.Cell reports. Medicine · 2026Article
- The functional neurobiology of dispositions towards negative emotions.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Empathy for pain in humans and animals differs based on species, psychosocial and cultural factors.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Neural signatures of emotional intent and inference align during social consensus.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The functional neurobiology of negative affective traits across regions, networks, signatures, and a machine learning multiverse.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Neural representations in MPFC and insula encode individual differences in estimating others' preferences.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Naturalistic acute pain states decoded from neural and facial dynamics.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Decoding Mindfulness With Multivariate Predictive Models.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2025Review
66 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Understanding how humans represent others' pain is critical for understanding pro-social behavior. 'Shared experience' theories propose common brain representations for somatic and vicarious pain, but other evidence suggests that specialized circuits are required to experience others' suffering. Combining functional neuroimaging with multivariate pattern analyses, we identified dissociable patterns that predicted somatic (high versus low: 100%) and vicarious (high versus low: 100%) pain intensity in out-of-sample individuals. Critically, each pattern was at chance in predicting the other experience, demonstrating separate modifiability of both patterns. Somatotopy (upper versus lower limb: 93% accuracy for both conditions) was also distinct, located in somatosensory versus mentalizing-related circuits for somatic and vicarious pain, respectively. Two additional studies demonstrated the generalizability of the somatic pain pattern (which was originally developed on thermal pain) to mechanical and electrical pain, and also demonstrated the replicability of the somatic/vicarious dissociation. These findings suggest possible mechanisms underlying limitations in feeling others' pain, and present new, more specific, brain targets for studying pain empathy.
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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.