Increased similarity of neural responses to experienced and empathic distress in costly altruism.

ABSTRACT: Empathy-affective resonance with others' sensory or emotional experiences-is hypothesized to be an important precursor to altruism. However, it is not known whether real-world altruists' heightened empathy reflects true self-other mapping of multi-voxel neural response patterns. We investigated this relationship in adults who had engaged in extraordinarily costly real-world altruism: donating a kidney to a stranger. Altruists and controls completed fMRI testing while anticipating and experiencing pain, and watching as a stranger anticipated and experienced pain. Machine learning classifiers tested for shared representation between experienced and observed distress. Altruists exhibited more similar representations of experienced and observed fearful anticipation spontaneously and following

SUBMITTER: O'Connell K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6656917 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature