title: The Anatomy of Suffering: Understanding the Relationship between Nociceptive and Empathic Pain.
abstract: Pain features centrally in numerous illnesses and generates enormous public health costs. Despite its ubiquity, the psychological and neurophysiological nature of pain remains controversial. Here, we survey one controversy in particular: the relation between nociceptive pain, which is somatic in origin, and empathic pain, which arises from observing others in pain. First, we review evidence for neural overlap between nociceptive and empathic pain and what this overlap implies about underlying mental representations. Then, we propose a framework for understanding the nature of the psychological and neurophysiological correspondence across these types of 'pain'. This framework suggests new directions for research that can better identify shared and dissociable representations underlying different types of distress, and can inform theories about the nature of pain.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. Electronic address: jzaki@stanford.edu.
authors.forename: Jamil
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zaki
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA.
authors.forename: Tor D
authors.initials: TD
authors.lastname: Wager
authors.affiliation: Department of Social Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
authors.forename: Tania
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Singer
authors.affiliation: Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Keysers
authors.affiliation: Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Valeria
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Gazzola
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000473:pathology*; D004645:Empathy / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D059225:Nociception / Q000502:physiology*; D010146:Pain / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000473:pathology* / Q000523:psychology*; D013315:Stress, Psychological / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000209:etiology*
keywords: ACC; anterior insula; empathy; fMRI; multivariate pattern analysis; nociception; pain