ArticleCurrent biology : CB2019
Emotional Mirror Neurons in the Rat's Anterior Cingulate Cortex.
Article in Current biology : CB, 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 85 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
85 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 234 citations in OpenAlex.
- Social contagion of pain and fear results in opposite social behaviors in rodents: meta- analysis of experimental studies.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2024Pooled it
- Beyond Sharing Unpleasant Affect-Evidence for Pain-Specific Opioidergic Modulation of Empathy for Pain.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2021Trial
- Selective perturbation of mirror and non-mirror neurons in an in silico model of the action observation network.iScience · 2026Article
- Individual differences in prosocial learning are represented in the hippocampal dorsal CA1.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Neural basis of social hierarchy across species.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2026Review
- The behavioral and neural architecture of observational active avoidance is shaped by demonstrator experience and observer sex.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Neural correlates of social cognition in stroke and traumatic brain injury: A systematic review.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Review
- Increased c-Fos expression in lateral habenula during social transmission of negative valence in prairie voles.Molecular autism · 2026Article
- The Anterior Cingulate Cortex and Prosocial Behavior toward Others in Negative State.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Review
- Multi-region social-emotional network underlying the effects of spine pinching therapy on empathy-like behavior in a rat model of autism spectrum disorder.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Article
- Neural basis of cooperative behavior in biological and artificial intelligence systems.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- Article
- High-dose medetomidine increases functional connectivity in the fear-related regions after electrical stimulation.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- A Quantitative Review of Brain Activation Maps for Mentalizing, Empathy, and Social Interactions: Specifying Commonalities and Differences.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Brain circuits that regulate social behavior.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Review
- Neural and Behavioral Correlates of Individual Variability in Rat Helping Behavior: A Role for Social Affiliation and Oxytocin Receptors.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- What Else Is Happening to the Mirror Neurons?-A Bibliometric Analysis of Mirror Neuron Research Trends and Future Directions (1996-2024).Brain and behavior · 2025Article
- Roles of mediodorsal thalamus in observational fear-related neural activity in mouse anterior cingulate cortex.Molecular brain · 2025Article
- Cortical representations of affective pain shape empathic fear in male mice.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Research progress on the mechanisms of pain empathy.Ibrain · 2025Review
25 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
How do the emotions of others affect us? The human anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) responds while experiencing pain in the self and witnessing pain in others, but the underlying cellular mechanisms remain poorly understood. Here we show the rat ACC (area 24) contains neurons responding when a rat experiences pain as triggered by a laser and while witnessing another rat receive footshocks. Most of these neurons do not respond to a fear-conditioned sound (CS). Deactivating this region reduces freezing while witnessing footshocks to others but not while hearing the CS. A decoder trained on spike counts while witnessing footshocks to another rat can decode stimulus intensity both while witnessing pain in another and while experiencing the pain first-hand. Mirror-like neurons thus exist in the ACC that encode the pain of others in a code shared with first-hand pain experience. A smaller population of neurons responded to witnessing footshocks to others and while hearing the CS but not while experiencing laser-triggered pain. These differential responses suggest that the ACC may contain channels that map the distress of another animal onto a mosaic of pain- and fear-sensitive channels in the observer. More experiments are necessary to determine whether painfulness and fearfulness in particular or differences in arousal or salience are responsible for these differential responses.
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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.