ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2022
Mu rhythm suppression over sensorimotor regions is associated with greater empathic accuracy.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Empathy and Interest Towards an Autistic Person and the Effect of Disclosing the Diagnosis.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2026Article
- Empathy for pain persists across live two-way video interactions and viewing of prerecorded videos.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Nuances of double empathy in autistic and non-autistic people: examination using the empathic accuracy paradigm.Molecular autism · 2026Article
- Effects of tRNS on perception of static and dynamic displays of social-emotional communication.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- A transdisciplinary framework for empathy research.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Directional bias in interpersonal emotion perception.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Neural signatures of emotional intent and inference align during social consensus.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Modeling Emotional Arousal With Turbulence Measured by EEG.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- Feedback matters: EEG correlates of empathy involved in the naturalistic communication of emotions.Heliyon · 2024Article
- Electromagnetic Source Imaging in Presurgical Evaluation of Children with Drug-Resistant Epilepsy.Journal of visualized experiments : JoVE · 2024Article
- Beyond physical sensations: investigating empathy and prosocial behavior in vicarious pain responders.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Article
- Intonation Units in Spontaneous Speech Evoke a Neural Response.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
When people encounter others' emotions, they engage multiple brain systems, including parts of the sensorimotor cortex associated with motor simulation. Simulation-related brain activity is commonly described as a 'low-level' component of empathy and social cognition. It remains unclear whether and how sensorimotor simulation contributes to complex empathic judgments. Here, we combine a naturalistic social paradigm with a reliable index of sensorimotor cortex-based simulation: electroencephalography suppression of oscillatory activity in the mu frequency band. We recruited participants to watch naturalistic video clips of people ('targets') describing emotional life events. In two experiments, participants viewed these clips (i) with video and sound, (ii) with only video or (iii) with only sound and provided continuous ratings of how they believed the target felt. We operationalized 'empathic accuracy' as the correlation between participants' inferences and targets' self-report. In Experiment 1 (US sample), across all conditions, right-lateralized mu suppression tracked empathic accuracy. In Experiment 2 (Israeli sample), this replicated only when using individualized frequency-bands and only for the visual stimuli. Our results provide novel evidence that sensorimotor representations-as measured through mu suppression-play a role not only in low-level motor simulation, but also in higher-level inferences about others' emotions, especially when visual cues are crucial for accuracy.
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