Empathic pain evoked by sensory and emotional-communicative cues share common and process-specific neural representations

Abstract

Pain empathy can be evoked by multiple cues, particularly observation of acute pain inflictions or facial expressions of pain. Previous studies suggest that these cues commonly activate the insula and anterior cingulate, yet vicarious pain encompasses pain-specific responses as well as unspecific processes (e.g. arousal) and overlapping activations are not sufficient to determine process-specific shared neural representations. We employed multivariate pattern analyses to fMRI data acquired during observation of noxious stimulation of body limbs (NS) and painful facial expressions (FE) and found spatially and functionally similar cross-modality (NS versus FE) wholebrain vicarious pain-predictive patterns. Further analyses consistently identified shared neural representations in the bilateral mid-insula. The vicarious pain patterns were not sensitive to respond to non-painful high-arousal negative stimuli but predicted self-experienced thermal pain. Finally, a domain-general vicarious pain pattern predictive of self-experienced pain but not arousal was developed. Our findings demonstrate shared pain-associated neural representations of vicarious pain.