Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-10-2010
Abstract
The frontoinsular cortex (FI) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) are thought to be involved in empathy for others' pain. However, the functional roles of FI and ACC in empathetic responses have not yet been clearly dissociated in previous studies. In this study, participants viewed color photographs depicting human body parts in painful or nonpainful situations and performed either pain judgment (painful/nonpainful) or laterality judgment (left/right) of the body parts. We found that activation of FI, rather than ACC, showed significant increase for painful compared with nonpainful images, regardless of the task requirement. Our data suggest a clear functional dissociation between FI and ACC in which FI is more domain-specific than ACC when processing empathy for pain.
Comments
This article was originally published in The Journal of Neuroscience, available at https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4844-09.2010
This is an open access article distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).