ArticleFrontiers in behavioral neuroscience2017
How Situational Context Impacts Empathic Responses and Brain Activation Patterns.
Article in Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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
17 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled 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
- Job Stress and Ethical Decision-Making Among Healthcare Workers in Post-Pandemic Infectious Disease Control.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Neural empathy mechanisms are shared for physical and social pain, and increase from adolescence to older adulthood.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Article
- The Empathetic Involvement of Nurses in the Context of Neuroscience: A Mixed-Methods Study.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- A mediation approach in resting-state connectivity between the medial prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate in mild cognitive impairment.Aging clinical and experimental research · 2024Article
- Healthcare experience affects pain-specific responses to others' suffering in the anterior insula.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- Moving beyond the lab: investigating empathy through the Empirical 5E approach.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Self-Conscious Emotions and the Right Fronto-Temporal and Right Temporal Parietal Junction.Brain sciences · 2022Review
- The Current View on the Paradox of Pain in Autism Spectrum Disorders.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Review
- Differences in empathy toward patients between medical and nonmedical students: an fMRI study.Advances in health sciences education : theory and practice · 2021Article
- Identification of pain in neonates: the adults' visual perception of neonatal facial features.Journal of perinatology : official journal of the California Perinatal Association · 2021Article
- Psychopathic traits mediate guilt-related anterior midcingulate activity under authority pressure.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Article
- Aggression, Moral Disengagement and Empathy. A Longitudinal Study Within the Interpersonal Dynamics of Bullying.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Medical students' empathy positively predicts charitable donation behavior.The journal of positive psychology · 2020Article
- The Neurobehavioral Mechanisms Underlying Attitudes Toward People With Mental or Physical Illness.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2020Article
- Pain management decisions in emergency hospitals are predicted by brain activity during empathy and error monitoring.British journal of anaesthesia · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Clinical empathy, which is defined as the ability to understand the patient's experience and feelings from the patient's perspective, is acknowledged to be an important aspect of quality healthcare. However, how work experience modulates the empathic responses and brain activation patterns in medical professions remains elusive. This fMRI study recruited one hundred female nurses, who varied the length of work experience, and examined how their neural response, functional connectivity, and subjective evaluations of valence and arousal to perceiving another individual in physical pain are modulated by the situational context in which they occur (i.e., in a hospital or at home). Participants with longer hospital terms evaluated pain as less negative in valence and arousal when occurring in a hospital context, but not in a home context. Physical pain perceived in a hospital compared to a home context produced stronger activity in the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ). The reverse comparison resulted in an increased activity in the insula and anterior midcingulate cortex (aMCC). Mediation analysis indicated that reduced personal accomplishment, a symptom of burnout, breaks down the mediation effect of the putamen on context-dependent valence ratings. Overall, the study demonstrates how situational contexts significantly influence individuals' empathic processing, and that perceiving reward from patient care protects them from burnout.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.