ArticleeLife2020
Empathic pain evoked by sensory and emotional-communicative cues share common and process-specific neural representations.
Article in eLife, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 52 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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.
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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
52 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 131 citations in OpenAlex.
- The shared neural substrates of emotional mimicry and emotional contagion: an activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis and meta-analytic connectivity modeling analysis.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Pooled it
- Dysregulated anterior insula reactivity as robust functional biomarker for chronic pain-Meta-analytic evidence from neuroimaging studies.Human brain mapping · 2022Pooled it
- The Angiotensin Antagonist Losartan Modulates Social Reward Motivation and Punishment Sensitivity via Modulating Midbrain-Striato-Frontal Circuits.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Trial
- Social rank modulates empathic pain via Galntl6Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Disgust Propensity, Not Disgust Sensitivity, Shapes the Reactivity of a Subjective Disgust Circuit in Humans.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- Latent neural architecture organising shared aesthetic evaluations of visual artworks.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Common and distinct neurofunctional signatures of dynamic naturalistic emotion regulation strategies.Nature communications · 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
- Neurobiological mechanisms and treatment of empathic pain in nonsuicidal self-injury.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Review
- The mediating role of emotional empathy in the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and misophonia: a structural equation modeling.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Harnessing the Neurobiology of Empathy and Compassion to Alleviate Burnout in Neurology.Annals of neurology · 2026Review
- Oxytocin and vasopressin enhance social pain empathy via common and distinct of neural expressions, genetic pathways, and networks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- A neurofunctional signature of affective arousal generalizes across valence domains and distinguishes subjective experience from autonomic reactivity.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Modulatory Effects of CB1 Receptors on Cognitive Performance in Rat Model of Empathic Pain.Basic and clinical neuroscience · 2025Article
- Regional and whole-brain neurofunctional alterations during pain empathic processing of physical but not affective pain in migraine patients.The journal of headache and pain · 2025Article
- Machine learning classification of active viewing of pain and non-pain images using EEG does not exceed chance in external validation samples.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Neural Patterns of Social Pain in the Brain-Wide Representations Across Social Contexts.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Segmentation-Based Blood Blurring: Examining Eye-Response Differences in Gory Video Viewing.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Individual differences in vicarious pain as a shift in the self-other boundary.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Endogenous opioid receptor system mediates costly altruism in the human brain.Communications biology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Pain empathy can be evoked by multiple cues, particularly observation of acute pain inflictions or facial expressions of pain. Previous studies suggest that these cues commonly activate the insula and anterior cingulate, yet vicarious pain encompasses pain-specific responses as well as unspecific processes (e.g. arousal) and overlapping activations are not sufficient to determine process-specific shared neural representations. We employed multivariate pattern analyses to fMRI data acquired during observation of noxious stimulation of body limbs (NS) and painful facial expressions (FE) and found spatially and functionally similar cross-modality (NS versus FE) whole-brain vicarious pain-predictive patterns. Further analyses consistently identified shared neural representations in the bilateral mid-insula. The vicarious pain patterns were not sensitive to respond to non-painful high-arousal negative stimuli but predicted self-experienced thermal pain. Finally, a domain-general vicarious pain pattern predictive of self-experienced pain but not arousal was developed. Our findings demonstrate shared pain-associated neural representations of vicarious pain.
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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.