Empathy

A pill as a quick solution: association between painkiller intake, empathy, and prosocial behavior

Previous research has demonstrated a link between the administration of analgesic drugs and the reduction of empathy levels in humans. This apparent blunting effect of pain medication has been explained through shared neural mechanisms for the …

To respond or not to respond: Exploring empathy-related psychological and structural brain differences between placebo analgesia responders and non-responders

Placebo responsiveness is highly variable across individuals. In the domain of pain, it may range from pronounced hypoalgesia to no response at all. Which factors predict such variation awaits clarification, as the available literature is …

Your pain in my brain

Pain is ubiquitous in life — we feel it when we accidentally hit our elbow on the door frame while rushing to the next meeting. But we also feel pain in the absence of firsthand experiences — for example, when we observe a colleague hitting his or …

Placebo analgesia reduces costly prosocial helping to lower another’s pain

Painkiller administration lowers pain empathy, but whether this also reduces prosocial behavior is unknown. In this preregistered study, we investigated whether inducing analgesia through a placebo painkiller reduced effortful helping. When given the …

Placebo analgesia does not reduce empathy for naturalistic depictions of others’ pain in a somatosensory specific way

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 has been mainly shown for affective pain processing, while …

Another's pain in my brain - No evidence that placebo analgesia affects the sensory-discriminative component in empathy for pain

The shared representations account of empathy suggests that sharing other people's emotions relies on neural processes similar to those engaged when directly experiencing such emotions. Recent research corroborated this by showing that placebo …