ArticleDevelopmental cognitive neuroscience2019
The role of the inferior frontal gyrus in vicarious social touch: A transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) study.
Article in Developmental cognitive neuroscience, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 21 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Ethnicity, minority status, and inter-group bias: A systematic meta-analysis on fMRI studies.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Pooled it
- Brain responses to social punishment: a meta-analysis.Scientific reports · 2019Pooled it
- Stimulation of the Social Brain Improves Perspective Selection in Older Adults: A HD-tDCS Study.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2021Trial
- The neurocognitive aspects of empathy and theory of mind in pragmatic language processing.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Harnessing the Neurobiology of Empathy and Compassion to Alleviate Burnout in Neurology.Annals of neurology · 2026Review
- Associations of Prenatal Social Support in Adolescent Mothers With Measures of Social-Emotional Development in Their Young Children.Brain and behavior · 2025Article
- "Rationality" enhancement through anodal tDCS over the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Dynamic functional adaptations during touch observation in autism: connectivity strength is linked to attitudes towards social touch and social responsiveness.Molecular autism · 2025Article
- Research Progress on Neural Processing of Hand and Forearm Tactile Sensation: A Review Based on fMRI Research.Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment · 2025Review
- Neurophysiological evidence of motor contribution to vicarious affective touch.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Primary somatosensory cortical processing in tactile communication.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- To touch or to be touched? comparing appraisal of vicarious execution and reception of interpersonal touch.PloS one · 2024Article
- Role of medial prefrontal cortex and primary somatosensory cortex in self and other-directed vicarious social touch: a TMS study.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Article
- Social Touch: Its Mirror-like Responses and Implications in Neurological and Psychiatric Diseases.NeuroSci · 2023Review
- Touched by loneliness-how loneliness impacts the response to observed human touch: a tDCS study.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
- Transcranial electric stimulation as a neural interface to gain insight on human brain functions: current knowledge and future perspective.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Review
- Transcranial Electrical Stimulation Offers the Possibility of Improving Teamwork Among Military Pilots: A Review.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Review
- Resting state brain subnetwork relates to prosociality and compassion in adolescents.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Potential Locations for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation in Treating Autism Spectrum Disorders-A Functional Connectivity Study.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2020Article
- Social touch: A new vista for developmental cognitive neuroscience?Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issuedErratum.2020
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The neural mechanisms facilitating the experience of vicarious social touch are largely unknown. The right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG) has been suggested as part of a simulation observation-execution neural network that plays a key role in the perception of tactile stimuli. Considering that vicarious social touch involves vicarious sharing of emotions, we hypothesized that emotional empathy, i.e., the ability to feel what another individual is feeling, modulates the neural responses to vicarious touch. To examine the role of the rIFG in vicarious touch and its modulation by levels of emotional empathy, we used anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on forty participants who observed photos depicting social touch, nonsocial touch or no touch during tDCS or sham stimulation. The results show that while participants with high levels of emotional empathy exhibited no change in ratings of vicarious social touch, participants with low levels of emotional empathy rate human touch as more emotional following anodal stimulation of the rIFG than following sham stimulation. These findings indicate that emotional responses to vicarious social touch are associated with rIFG activity and are modulated by levels of emotional empathy. This result has major therapeutic potential for individuals with low empathic abilities, such as those with ASD.
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