ArticleCognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience2020
Increasing self-other bodily overlap increases sensorimotor resonance to others' pain.
Article in Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience, 2020. 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.
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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
17 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 38 citations in OpenAlex.
- Visual perspective and body ownership modulate vicarious pain and touch: A systematic review.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Pooled it
- Distinct effects of empathy on self-other processing revealed by different behavioral and EEG indices.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- From bond to guardianship: a serial mediation model explaining how the human-pet bond protects against pet relinquishment.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2026Article
- Healing synchrony? potential benefits of interpersonal synchrony for chronic pain management.Frontiers in pain research (Lausanne, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Neural empathy mechanisms are shared for physical and social pain, and increase from adolescence to older adulthood.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Article
- Associations between alcohol consumption and empathy in a non-clinical sample: drinking motives as a moderator.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- I understand your pain but I do not feel it: lower affective empathy in response to others' social pain in narcissism.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- You are fired! Exclusion words induce corticospinal modulations associated with vicarious pain.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Article
- Are women more empathetic than men? Questionnaire and EEG estimations of sex/gender differences in empathic ability.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Article
- Increasing self-other similarity modulates ethnic bias in sensorimotor resonance to others' pain.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
- Mirror, mirror, on the wall: During pandemics, how can self-perception research in people with eating disorders happen at all?Journal of eating disorders · 2022Review
- The influence of EEG oscillations, heart rate variability changes, and personality on self-pain and empathy for pain under placebo analgesia.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- "I am feeling tension in my whole body": An experimental phenomenological study of empathy for pain.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Mu-desynchronization, N400 and corticospinal excitability during observation of natural and anatomically unnatural finger movements.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Article
- The effect of somatosensory alpha transcranial alternating current stimulation on pain empathy is trait empathy and gender dependent.CNS neuroscience & therapeutics · 2021Article
- Investigating the effects of pain observation on approach and withdrawal actions.Experimental brain research · 2021Article
- The Role of Sensorimotor Processes in Pain Empathy.Brain topography · 2019Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Empathy for another person's pain and feeling pain oneself seem to be accompanied by similar or shared neural responses. Such shared responses could be achieved by mapping the bodily states of others onto our own bodily representations. We investigated whether sensorimotor neural responses to the pain of others are increased when experimentally reducing perceived bodily distinction between the self and the other. Healthy adult participants watched video clips of the hands of ethnic ingroup or outgroup members being painfully penetrated by a needle syringe or touched by a cotton swab. Manipulating the video presentation to create a visuospatial overlap between the observer's and the target's hand increased the perceived bodily self-attribution of the target's hand. For both ingroup and outgroup targets, this resulted in increased neural responses to the painful injections (compared with nonpainful contacts), as indexed by desynchronizations of central mu and beta scalp rhythms recorded using electroencephalography. Furthermore, these empathy-related neural activations were stronger in participants who reported stronger bodily self-attribution of the other person's hand. Our findings provide further evidence that empathy for pain engages sensorimotor resonance mechanisms. They also indicate that reducing bodily self-other distinction may increase such resonance for ingroup as well as outgroup targets.
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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.