ArticleHuman brain mapping2023
Healthcare experience affects pain-specific responses to others' suffering in the anterior insula.
Article in Human brain mapping, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 10 citations in OpenAlex.
- Impact of adverse life experiences on pain, depression, anxiety, and comorbidities: a youth longitudinal sample.Pain reports · 2026Article
- Parietofrontal Networks Mediate Contextual Influences in the Appraisal of Pain and Disgust Facial Expressions.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Can the neural representation of physical pain predict empathy for pain in others?Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Article
- Gambling on others' health: risky pro-social decision-making in the era of COVID-19.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Healthcare experience affects pain-specific responses to others' suffering in the anterior insula.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Medical students and professional healthcare providers often underestimate patients' pain, together with decreased neural responses to pain information in the anterior insula (AI), a brain region implicated in self-pain processing and negative affect. However, the functional significance and specificity of these neural changes remains debated. Across two experiments, we recruited university medical students and emergency nurses to test the role of healthcare experience on the brain reactivity to other's pain, emotions, and beliefs, using both pictorial and verbal cues. Brain responses to self-pain was also assessed and compared with those to observed pain. Our results confirmed that healthcare experience decreased the activity in AI in response to others' suffering. This effect was independent from stimulus modality (pictures or texts), but specific for pain, as it did not generalize to inferences about other mental or affective states. Furthermore, representational similarity and multivariate pattern analysis revealed that healthcare experience impacted specifically a component of the neural representation of others' pain that is shared with that of first-hand nociception, and related more to AI than to other pain-responsive regions. Taken together, our study suggests a decreased propensity to appraise others' suffering as one's own, associated with a reduced recruitment of pain-specific information in AI. These findings provide new insights into neural mechanisms leading to pain underestimation by caregivers in clinical settings.
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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.