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The Role of Sensorimotor Processes in Pain Empathy
Pain is a salient, aversive sensation which motivates avoidance, but also has a strong social signaling function. Numerous studies have shown that regions of the nervous system active in association with first-hand pain are also active in response to the pain of others. When witnessing somatic pain,...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Springer US
2019
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6882755/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31705422 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10548-019-00738-4 |
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author | Riečanský, Igor Lamm, Claus |
author_facet | Riečanský, Igor Lamm, Claus |
author_sort | Riečanský, Igor |
collection | PubMed |
description | Pain is a salient, aversive sensation which motivates avoidance, but also has a strong social signaling function. Numerous studies have shown that regions of the nervous system active in association with first-hand pain are also active in response to the pain of others. When witnessing somatic pain, such as seeing bodies in painful situations, significant activations occur not only in areas related to the processing of negative emotions, but also in neuronal structures engaged in somatosensation and the control of skeletal muscles. These empathy-related sensorimotor activations are selectively reviewed in this article, with a focus on studies using electrophysiological methods and paradigms investigating responses to somatic pain. Convergent evidence from these studies shows that these activations (1) occur at multiple levels of the nervous system, from the spinal cord up to the cerebral cortex, (2) are best conceptualized as activations of a defensive system, in line with the role of pain to protect body from injury, and (3) contribute to establishing a matching of psychological states between the sufferer and the observer, which ultimately supports empathic understanding and motivate prosocial action. Future research should thus focus on how these sensorimotor responses are related to higher-order empathic responses, including affective sharing and emotion regulation, and how this motivates approach-related prosocial behaviors aimed at alleviating the pain and suffering of others. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6882755 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2019 |
publisher | Springer US |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-68827552019-12-12 The Role of Sensorimotor Processes in Pain Empathy Riečanský, Igor Lamm, Claus Brain Topogr Review Pain is a salient, aversive sensation which motivates avoidance, but also has a strong social signaling function. Numerous studies have shown that regions of the nervous system active in association with first-hand pain are also active in response to the pain of others. When witnessing somatic pain, such as seeing bodies in painful situations, significant activations occur not only in areas related to the processing of negative emotions, but also in neuronal structures engaged in somatosensation and the control of skeletal muscles. These empathy-related sensorimotor activations are selectively reviewed in this article, with a focus on studies using electrophysiological methods and paradigms investigating responses to somatic pain. Convergent evidence from these studies shows that these activations (1) occur at multiple levels of the nervous system, from the spinal cord up to the cerebral cortex, (2) are best conceptualized as activations of a defensive system, in line with the role of pain to protect body from injury, and (3) contribute to establishing a matching of psychological states between the sufferer and the observer, which ultimately supports empathic understanding and motivate prosocial action. Future research should thus focus on how these sensorimotor responses are related to higher-order empathic responses, including affective sharing and emotion regulation, and how this motivates approach-related prosocial behaviors aimed at alleviating the pain and suffering of others. Springer US 2019-11-08 2019 /pmc/articles/PMC6882755/ /pubmed/31705422 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10548-019-00738-4 Text en © The Author(s) 2019 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
spellingShingle | Review Riečanský, Igor Lamm, Claus The Role of Sensorimotor Processes in Pain Empathy |
title | The Role of Sensorimotor Processes in Pain Empathy |
title_full | The Role of Sensorimotor Processes in Pain Empathy |
title_fullStr | The Role of Sensorimotor Processes in Pain Empathy |
title_full_unstemmed | The Role of Sensorimotor Processes in Pain Empathy |
title_short | The Role of Sensorimotor Processes in Pain Empathy |
title_sort | role of sensorimotor processes in pain empathy |
topic | Review |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6882755/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31705422 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10548-019-00738-4 |
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