Trial reportScientific reports2019
Brain activity sustaining the modulation of pain by empathetic comments.
Trial report in Scientific reports, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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.
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
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Empathetic solicitude attenuates the affective and sensory dimensions of COPsychophysiology · 2025Trial
- Perspectives on Pain: A Narrative Review of Pain Beliefs, Coping, and Clinical Implications.Journal of pain research · 2026Review
- Connectivity Regression.Biostatistics (Oxford, England) · 2025Article
- Palliative care perceptions and well-being in nurses across healthcare settings: a comparative study from Reggio Emilia, Northern Italy.BMC palliative care · 2025Article
- Neurophysiological Oscillatory Mechanisms Underlying the Effect of Mirror Visual Feedback-Induced Illusion of Hand Movements on Nociception and Cortical Activation.Brain sciences · 2024Article
- Fractal Similarity of Pain Brain Networks.Advances in neurobiology · 2024Article
- Brain-to-brain mechanisms underlying pain empathy and social modulation of pain in the patient-clinician interaction.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- A Hidden Markov Model reveals magnetoencephalography spectral frequency-specific abnormalities of brain state power and phase-coupling in neuropathic pain.Communications biology · 2022Article
- The influence of social signals on the self-experience of pain: A neuroimaging review.Frontiers in neurology · 2022Review
- Amygdalar Functional Connectivity Differences Associated With Reduced Pain Intensity in Pediatric Peripheral Neuropathic Pain.Frontiers in pain research (Lausanne, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- A Virtual Reality Meditative Intervention Modulates Pain and the Pain Neuromatrix in Patients with Opioid Use Disorder.Pain medicine (Malden, Mass.) · 2021Article
- Can empathy be taught? A cross-sectional survey assessing training to deliver the diagnosis of end stage renal disease.PloS one · 2021Article
- Rhythmic Neural Patterns During Empathy to Vicarious Pain: Beyond the Affective-Cognitive Empathy Dichotomy.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Article
- Neural correlates of non-specific skin conductance responses during resting state fMRI.NeuroImage · 2020Article
- The Modular Organization of Pain Brain Networks: An fMRI Graph Analysis Informed by Intracranial EEG.Cerebral cortex communications · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Empathetic verbal feedback from others has been shown to alleviate the intensity of experimental pain. To investigate the brain changes associated with this effect, we conducted 3T-fMRI measurements in 30 healthy subjects who received painful thermal stimuli on their left hand while overhearing empathetic, neutral or unempathetic comments, supposedly made by experimenters, via headsets. Only the empathetic comments significantly reduced pain intensity ratings. A whole-brain BOLD analysis revealed that both Empathetic and Unempathetic conditions significantly increased the activation of the right anterior insular and posterior parietal cortices to pain stimuli, while activations in the posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus (PCC/Prec) were significantly stronger during Empathetic compared to Unempathetic condition. BOLD activity increased in the DLPFC in the Empathetic condition and decreased in the PCC/Prec and vmPFC in the Unempathetic condition. In the Empathetic condition only, functional connectivity increased significantly between the vmPFC and the insular cortex. These results suggest that modulation of pain perception by empathetic feedback involves a set of high-order brain regions associated with autobiographical memories and self-awareness, and relies on interactions between such supra-modal structures and key nodes of the pain system.
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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.