Changes to one’s pain processing system via external or cognitive influences may influence how we perceive the world around us and interact with other people. To investigate the causal effects of different types of (psycho)pharmacological pain …
Placebo pills reliably reduce pain. Pain perception is tied to increased arousal and heart rate, whose perception is closely related to interoceptive signals processing nociception and autonomic regulation. However, no studies so far have …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …