ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2024
Neural empathy mechanisms are shared for physical and social pain, and increase from adolescence to older adulthood.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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
8 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Can ketamine and other glutamate receptor modulators be considered entactogens?Psychiatry research · 2025Pooled it
- A causal and dissociable role for the right inferior frontal gyrus in empathy for physical and social pain.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Seeing and deciding to help: neural and attentional mechanisms of prosociality in younger and older adults.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Therapeutic modulation of empathy: pharmacological, neurostimulation, and behavioral approaches.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Preschoolers' exclusion detection and empathy: the mediating role of moral evaluation.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Empathy and validation in chronic pain couples: a systematic review.Pain reports · 2025Review
- Classifying social and physical pain from multimodal physiological signals using machine learning.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Mediation and Interaction of Cognitive Reappraisal in the Relationship Between Depression and Social Pain Among College Students.Psychology research and behavior management · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Empathy is a critical component of social interaction that enables individuals to understand and share the emotions of others. We report a preregistered experiment in which 240 participants, including adolescents, young adults, and older adults, viewed images depicting hands and feet in physically or socially painful situations (versus nonpainful). Empathy was measured using imagined pain ratings and EEG mu suppression. Imagined pain was greater for physical versus social pain, with young adults showing particular sensitivity to social pain events compared to adolescents and older adults. Mu desynchronization was greater to pain versus no-pain situations, but the physical/social context did not modulate pain responses. Brain responses to painful situations increased linearly from adolescence to young and older adulthood. These findings highlight shared activity across the core empathy network for both physical and social pain contexts, and an empathic response that develops over the lifespan with accumulating social experience.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.