ArticleeLife2022
Intracranial human recordings reveal association between neural activity and perceived intensity for the pain of others in the insula.
Article in eLife, 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.
- Complementary and opponent value signals in the human brain support choosing the best and avoiding the worst.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Top-down influence of the inferior frontal gyrus on motor cortex excitability during pain empathy.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Review
- Endogenous opioid receptor system mediates costly altruism in the human brain.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Cognitive control: exploring the causal role of the rTPJ in empathy for pain mediated by contextual information.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Article
- Intracranial EEG signals disentangle multi-areal neural dynamics of vicarious pain perception.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Motor Dysfunctions in Fibromyalgia Patients: The Importance of Breathing.Open access rheumatology : research and reviews · 2024Article
- Audible pain squeaks can mediate emotional contagion across pre-exposed rats with a potential effect of auto-conditioning.Communications biology · 2023Article
- The Missing Ingredient: How Misogyny and the Patriarchy Sabotage our Clinical Practice and Research.Clinical neuropsychiatry · 2023Article
- The Role of the Insular Cortex in Pain.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Review
- Intrinsic functional clustering of the macaque insular cortex.Frontiers in integrative neuroscience · 2023Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
15 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Based on neuroimaging data, the insula is considered important for people to empathize with the pain of others. Here, we present intracranial electroencephalographic (iEEG) recordings and single-cell recordings from the human insula while seven epilepsy patients rated the intensity of a woman's painful experiences seen in short movie clips. Pain had to be deduced from seeing facial expressions or a hand being slapped by a belt. We found activity in the broadband 20-190 Hz range correlated with the trial-by-trial perceived intensity in the insula for both types of stimuli. Within the insula, some locations had activity correlating with perceived intensity for our facial expressions but not for our hand stimuli, others only for our hand but not our face stimuli, and others for both. The timing of responses to the sight of the hand being hit is best explained by kinematic information; that for our facial expressions, by shape information. Comparing the broadband activity in the iEEG signal with spiking activity from a small number of neurons and an fMRI experiment with similar stimuli revealed a consistent spatial organization, with stronger associations with intensity more anteriorly, while viewing the hand being slapped.
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