Healthcare experience affects pain-specific responses to others' suffering in the anterior insula.

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 indepen

SUBMITTER: Corradi-Dell'Acqua C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10619377 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature