title: Social hierarchy modulates neural responses of empathy for pain.
abstract: Recent evidence indicates that empathic responses to others' pain are modulated by various situational and individual factors. However, few studies have examined how empathy and underlying brain functions are modulated by social hierarchies, which permeate human society with an enormous impact on social behavior and cognition. In this study, social hierarchies were established based on incidental skill in a perceptual task in which all participants were mediumly ranked. Afterwards, participants were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging while watching inferior-status or superior-status targets receiving painful or non-painful stimulation. The results revealed that painful stimulation applied to inferior-status targets induced higher activations in the anterior insula (AI) and anterior medial cingulate cortex (aMCC), whereas these empathic brain activations were significantly attenuated in response to superior-status targets' pain. Further, this neural empathic bias to inferior-status targets was accompanied by stronger functional couplings of AI with brain regions important in emotional processing (i.e. thalamus) and cognitive control (i.e. middle frontal gyrus). Our findings indicate that emotional sharing with others' pain is shaped by relative positions in a social hierarchy such that underlying empathic neural responses are biased toward inferior-status compared with superior-status individuals.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Affective and Social Neuroscience, School of Psychology and Sociology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China, State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China, and.
authors.forename: Chunliang
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Feng
authors.affiliation: Institute of Affective and Social Neuroscience, School of Psychology and Sociology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China.
authors.forename: Zhihao
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China, and.
authors.forename: Xue
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Feng
authors.affiliation: School of Educational Science, Huaiyin Normal University, Huaian, China.
authors.forename: Lili
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China, and.
authors.forename: Tengxiang
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Tian
authors.affiliation: Institute of Affective and Social Neuroscience, School of Psychology and Sociology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China, Collaborative Innovation Center of Sichuan for Elder Care and Health, Chengdu Medical College, Chengdu, China luoyj@szu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Yue-Jia
authors.initials: YJ
authors.lastname: Luo
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology; D001931:Brain Mapping; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D004645:Empathy / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000502:physiology; D006179:Gyrus Cinguli / Q000502:physiology; D006608:Hierarchy, Social; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009434:Neural Pathways / Q000502:physiology; D010146:Pain / Q000523:psychology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D012919:Social Behavior; D013788:Thalamus / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 Items (TAS-20); anterior insula (AI); anterior medial cingulate cortex (aMCC); empathy; functional connectivity; social hierarchy