Journal
NEUROSCIENCE LETTERS
Volume 469, Issue 3, Pages 328-332Publisher
ELSEVIER IRELAND LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.neulet.2009.12.021
Keywords
Empathy; Event-related potential; Pain; Perspective taking
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Funding
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [30630025, 30828012, 30910103901]
- National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) [2010CB833903]
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Recent event-related brain potential (ERP) study disentangled an early automatic component and a late top-down controlled component of neural activities to perceived pain of others. This study assessed the hypothesis that perspective taking modulates the top-down controlled component but not the automatic component of empathy for pain by recording ERPs from 24 subjects who performed pain judgments of pictures of hands in painful or non-painful situations from either self-perspective or other-perspective. We found that, relative to non-painful stimuli, painful stimuli induced positive shifts of ERPs at frontal-central electrodes as early as 160 ms after sensory stimulation and this effect lasted until 700 ms. The amplitudes of ERPs at 230-250 ms elicited by painful stimuli negatively correlated with both subjective ratings of others' pain and self-unpleasantness in both self-perspective and other-perspective conditions. Neural response to perceived pain over the central-parietal area was significantly reduced at 370-420 ms when performing the pain judgment task from other-perspective compared to self-perspective. The results suggest that shifting between self-perspectives and other-perspectives modulates the late controlled component but not the early automatic component of neural responses to perceived pain. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.
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