Convergence of physiological responses to pain during face-to-face interaction.

ABSTRACT: Empathy with another's pain is an important social glue for maintaining interpersonal relationships. In most previous studies investigating the sharing of pain, a signal conveying a painful experience is presented by a target ("sender") as a stimulus to a participant ("receiver"), and the emotional/physiological responses of the participant are measured. However, this unilateral "sender-receiver" paradigm does not adequately address the possible bidirectional experience of shared pain accruing from interaction. Our aim was therefore to investigate the bidirectional effects of sharing pain in social settings. Thirty-six unfamiliar pairs were simultaneously and repeatedly exposed to the same pain-provoking (thermal) stimuli, either in a face-to-face or a "shielded" condition where a partitio

SUBMITTER: Murata A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6965106 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature