Trial reportCerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)2021
Beyond Sharing Unpleasant Affect-Evidence for Pain-Specific Opioidergic Modulation of Empathy for Pain.
Trial report in Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991), 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Shared effects of the opioid antagonist naltrexone on first-hand and empathic pain.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Trial
- Placebo Analgesia Does Not Generalize From Pain to Interoceptive Abilities: A Preregistered Exploratory Study.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Context-dependent placebo hypoalgesia through observational learning: the role of empathy in immersive and non-immersive environments.NPJ digital medicine · 2026Article
- Article
- Characteristics of vicarious touch reports in a general population.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Neuropsychological mechanisms of observational learning in human placebo effects.Psychopharmacology · 2025Review
- Research progress on the mechanisms of pain empathy.Ibrain · 2025Review
- Empathy from dissimilarity: Multivariate pattern analysis of neural activity during observation of somatosensory experience.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Healthcare experience affects pain-specific responses to others' suffering in the anterior insula.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- Article
- A pill as a quick solution: association between painkiller intake, empathy, and prosocial behavior.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The influence of aggressive exercise on responses to self-perceived and others' pain.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Altruistic responses to the most vulnerable involve sensorimotor processes.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Perspective-taking is associated with increased discriminability of affective states in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
- Placebo Analgesia Reduces Costly Prosocial Helping to Lower Another Person's Pain.Psychological science · 2022Article
- Give me a pain that I am used to: distinct habituation patterns to painful and non-painful stimulation.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- EEG and fMRI evidence for autobiographical memory reactivation in empathy.Human brain mapping · 2021Article
- ERP Indicators of Self-Pain and Other Pain Reductions due to Placebo Analgesia Responding: The Moderating Role of the Fight-Flight-Freeze System.Brain sciences · 2021Article
- Detached empathic experience of others' pain in remitted states of depression - An fMRI study.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2021Article
- Placebo Analgesia Does Not Reduce Empathy for Naturalistic Depictions of Others' Pain in a Somatosensory Specific Way.Cerebral cortex communications · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
It is not known how specific the neural mechanisms underpinning empathy for different domains are. In the present study, we set out to test whether shared neural representations between first-hand pain and empathy for pain are pain-specific or extend to empathy for unpleasant affective touch as well. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and psychopharmacological experiments, we investigated if placebo analgesia reduces first-hand and empathic experiences of affective touch, and compared them with the effects on pain. Placebo analgesia also affected the first-hand and empathic experience of unpleasant touch, implicating domain-general effects. However, and in contrast to pain and pain empathy, administering an opioid antagonist did not block these effects. Moreover, placebo analgesia reduced neural activity related to both modalities in the bilateral insular cortex, while it specifically modulated activity in the anterior midcingulate cortex for pain and pain empathy. These findings provide causal evidence that one of the major neurochemical systems for pain regulation is involved in pain empathy, and crucially substantiates the role of shared representations in empathy.
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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.