Feeling the pain of others is associated with self-other confusion and prior pain experience (original) (raw)

Perceiving pain in others: automatic and controlled mechanisms

The journal of pain : official journal of the American Pain Society, 2010

Recent developments in clinical, cognitive, and behavioral sciences as well as in social neuroscience can provide new perspectives on our understanding of different forms of pain expression and the social reactions of observers to various types of pain expression. Studies indicate that pain expression is governed by both automatic (unintentional, reflexive) and controlled (intentional, purposive) neuroregulatory systems. Reciprocal mechanisms in observers responsible for automatic (unintentional, reflexive) and controlled (intentional, reflective) reactions also are important. Observers appear more likely to display immediate "visceral" emotional reactions to unintentional, reflexive expression, whereas controlled expression characterized by purposive behavior appears more likely to elicit reflection on the nature and origins of the person's pain. This review summarizes research within the context of a theoretical model for understanding how pain is perceived in other...

Individual differences in the vicarious perception of pain

2018

Vicarious pain refers to the processes and experiences that arise from observations of other people in pain. Due to the interpersonal and multi-modal nature of these processes, research into the field is highly relevant for a number of key concepts in social cognitive neuroscience, such as empathy, multi-sensory processing and social cognition. The dominant approach in the field has been to focus on normative samples with little focus being given to inter-individual differences. The discovery of a subsample of the population who report conscious experiences of pain when observing it, so called ‘mirror-pain responders’, presents a significant opportunity for developing our understanding of the neural processes and characteristics associated with vicarious pain. The present thesis aims to extend understanding of this group who appear to lie on an extreme end of a spectrum of vicarious pain perception. Although past research has highlighted this group and made some attempts to identify...

Effects of vicarious pain on self-pain perception: investigating the role of awareness

Journal of Pain Research

The observation of pain in others may enhance or reduce self-pain, yet the boundary conditions and factors that determine the direction of such effects are poorly understood. The current study set out to show that visual stimulus awareness plays a crucial role in determining whether vicarious pain primarily activates behavioral defense systems that enhance pain sensitivity and stimulate withdrawal or appetitive systems that attenuate pain sensitivity and stimulate approach. We employed a mixed factorial design with the between-subject factors exposure time (subliminal vs optimal) and vicarious pain (pain vs no pain images), and the within-subject factor session (baseline vs trial) to investigate how visual awareness of vicarious pain images affects subsequent self-pain in the cold-pressor test. Self-pain tolerance, intensity and unpleasantness were evaluated in a sample of 77 healthy participants. Results revealed significant interactions of exposure time and vicarious pain in all three dependent measures. In the presence of visual awareness (optimal condition), vicarious pain compared to no-pain elicited overall enhanced self-pain sensitivity, indexed by reduced pain tolerance and enhanced ratings of pain intensity and unpleasantness. Conversely, in the absence of visual awareness (subliminal condition), vicarious pain evoked decreased self-pain intensity and unpleasantness while pain tolerance remained unaffected. These findings suggest that the activation of defense mechanisms by vicarious pain depends on relatively elaborate cognitive processes, while-strikingly-the appetitive system is activated in highly automatic manner independent from stimulus awareness. Such mechanisms may have evolved to facilitate empathic, protective approach responses toward suffering individuals, ensuring survival of the protective social group.

Observing another in pain facilitates vicarious experiences and modulates somatosensory experiences

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2014

Objective: This study investigated whether individuals reporting vicarious pain in daily life (e.g., the self-reported vicarious pain group) display vicarious experiences during an experimental paradigm, and also show an improved detection of somatosensory stimuli while observing another in pain. Furthermore, this study investigated the stability of these phenomena. Finally, this study explored the putative modulating role of dispositional empathy and hypervigilance for pain.

Atypical Bodily Self-Awareness in Vicarious Pain Responders

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2019

Vicarious perception refers to the ability to co-represent the experiences of others. Prior research has shown considerable inter-individual variability in vicarious perception of pain, with some experiencing conscious sensations of pain on their own body when viewing another person in pain (conscious vicarious perception / mirror-pain synaesthesia). Self-Other Theory proposes that this conscious vicarious perception may result from impairments in self-other distinction and maintaining a coherent sense of bodily self. In support of this, individuals who experience conscious vicarious perception are more susceptible to illusions of body ownership and agency. However, little work has assessed whether trait differences in bodily self- awareness are associated with conscious vicarious pain. Here we addressed this gap by examining individual difference factors related to awareness of the body, in conscious vicarious pain responders. Increased self-reported depersonalisation and interoceptive sensibility was found for conscious vicarious pain responders compared with non-responders, in addition to more internally-oriented thinking (associated with lower alexithymia). There were no significant differences in trait anxiety. Results indicate that maintaining a stable sense of the bodily self may be important for vicarious perception of pain, and that vicarious perception might also be enhanced by attention towards internal bodily states.

Self-Observation as a Source of Pain Perception

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1968

The hypothesis was tested that an individual's perception of a stimulus as un-comfortable or painful is partially an inference from his own observation of his response to that stimulus. Ss were required to observe themselves cither escaping or enduring a series of electric ...

Increasing self-other bodily overlap increases sensorimotor resonance to others’ pain

Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience

Empathy for another person's pain and feeling pain oneself seem to be accompanied by similar or shared neural responses. Such shared responses could be achieved by mapping the bodily states of others onto our own bodily representations. We investigated whether sensorimotor neural responses to the pain of others are increased when experimentally reducing perceived bodily distinction between the self and the other. Healthy adult participants watched video clips of the hands of ethnic ingroup or outgroup members being painfully penetrated by a needle syringe or touched by a cotton swab. Manipulating the video presentation to create a visuospatial overlap between the observer's and the target's hand increased the perceived bodily self-attribution of the target's hand. For both ingroup and outgroup targets, this resulted in increased neural responses to the painful injections (compared with nonpainful contacts), as indexed by desynchronizations of central mu and beta scalp rhythms recorded using electroencephalography. Furthermore, these empathy-related neural activations were stronger in participants who reported stronger bodily self-attribution of the other person's hand. Our findings provide further evidence that empathy for pain engages sensorimotor resonance mechanisms. They also indicate that reducing bodily self-other distinction may increase such resonance for ingroup as well as outgroup targets.

What is it like to feel another's pain?

Mind, 2010

We offer an account of empathetic pain that preserves the distinctions among standard pain, contagious pain, empathetic pain, sympathy for pain, and standard pain ascription. Vicarious experiences of both contagious and empathetic pain resemble to some extent experiences of standard pain. But there are also crucial dissimilarities. As neuroscientific results show, standard pain involves a sensorimotor and an affective component. According to our account, contagious pain consists in imagining the former, whereas empathetic pain consists in imagining the latter. We further argue that awareness of another's standard pain is part of empathetic pain, but empathetic awareness of another's standard pain differs from believing that another is in standard pain.