ArticleScientific reports2019
Increased similarity of neural responses to experienced and empathic distress in costly altruism.
Article in Scientific reports, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Empathy and Psychological Outcomes in Informal Caregivers of Community-Dwelling Older Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2025Pooled it
- A feature-based network analysis and fMRI meta-analysis reveal three distinct types of prosocial decisions.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Pooled it
- Lonelier people feel less empathic despite intact neural empathy responses after meditation training.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Trial
- Early life adversity shapes neural and behavioural responses to oxytocin during altruistic decision-making.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Frontal-limbic mediated implicit cognitive control of emotion in the transition to adolescence.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Article
- Neurocomputational basis of learning when choices simultaneously affect both oneself and others.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Right hemisphere stroke is linked to reduced social connectedness in the UK Biobank cohort.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Belief in a just world and fair behavior among clinical nurses: a moderated mediation model of empathy and observer justice sensitivity.BMC nursing · 2024Article
- Healthcare experience affects pain-specific responses to others' suffering in the anterior insula.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- Neural responses underlying extraordinary altruists' generosity for socially distant others.PNAS nexus · 2023Article
- Unselfish traits and social decision-making patterns characterize six populations of real-world extraordinary altruists.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Moral foundations, values, and judgments in extraordinary altruists.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Article
- The bright and dark sides of egoism.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Review
- Charity preferences and perceived impact moderate charitable giving and associated neural response.Neuropsychologia · 2021Article
- Lesion Evidence for a Causal Role of the Insula in Aversion to Social Inequity.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Article
- Help or flight? Increased threat imminence promotes defensive helping in humans.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Activation in bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) corresponds to everyday helping.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2020Article
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9 authors.
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Abstract
Empathy-affective resonance with others' sensory or emotional experiences-is hypothesized to be an important precursor to altruism. However, it is not known whether real-world altruists' heightened empathy reflects true self-other mapping of multi-voxel neural response patterns. We investigated this relationship in adults who had engaged in extraordinarily costly real-world altruism: donating a kidney to a stranger. Altruists and controls completed fMRI testing while anticipating and experiencing pain, and watching as a stranger anticipated and experienced pain. Machine learning classifiers tested for shared representation between experienced and observed distress. Altruists exhibited more similar representations of experienced and observed fearful anticipation spontaneously and following an empathy prompt in anterior insula and anterior/middle cingulate cortex, respectively, suggesting heightened empathic proclivities and abilities for fear. During pain epochs, altruists were distinguished by spontaneous empathic responses in anterior insula, anterior/mid-cingulate cortex and supplementary motor area, but showed no difference from controls after the empathy prompt. These findings (1) link shared multi-voxel representations of the distress of self and others to real-world costly altruism, (2) reinforce distinctions between empathy for sensory states like pain and anticipatory affective states like fear, and (3) highlight the importance of differentiating between the proclivity and ability to empathize.
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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.