Placebo Analgesia Does Not Reduce Empathy for Naturalistic Depictions of Others' Pain in a Somatosensory Specific Way.

ABSTRACT: The shared representations account postulates that sharing another's pain recruits underlying brain functions also engaged during first-hand pain. Critically, direct causal evidence for this was mainly shown for affective pain processing, while the contribution of somatosensory processes to empathy remains controversial. This controversy may be explained, however, by experimental paradigms that did not direct attention towards a specific body part, or that did not employ naturalistic depictions of others' pain. In this preregistered functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we aimed to test whether causal manipulation of first-hand pain affects empathy for naturalistic depictions of pain in a somatosensory-matched manner. Forty-five participants underwent a placebo analgesia induction i

SUBMITTER: Hartmann H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8276832 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature