Fan Yan, Han Shihui
Department of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, PR China.
Neuropsychologia. 2008 Jan 15;46(1):160-73. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.07.023. Epub 2007 Aug 6.
Previous neuroimaging studies have identified a neural circuit that is involved in empathy for pain. However, the temporal dynamics of neural activities underlying empathic processes remains poorly understood. This was investigated in the current study by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) from healthy adults who were presented with pictures or cartoons of hands that were in painful or neutral situations. Subjects performed a pain judgment task that required attention to pain cues in the stimuli or a counting task that withdrew their attention from these cues. The ERP results showed early differentiation between painful and neutral stimuli over the frontal lobe at 140 ms after sensory stimulation. A long-latency empathic response was observed after 380 ms over the central-parietal regions and was more salient over the left than right hemispheres. The early and late empathic responses were, respectively, modulated by contextual reality of stimuli and by top-down attention to the pain cues. Moreover, the mean ERP amplitudes at 140-180 ms were correlated with subjective reports of the degree of perceived pain of others and of self-unpleasantness. The ERP results support a model of empathy for pain consisting of early emotional sharing and late cognitive evaluation.
以往的神经影像学研究已经确定了一个与疼痛共情有关的神经回路。然而，共情过程背后神经活动的时间动态仍知之甚少。在本研究中，通过记录健康成年人在看到处于疼痛或中性情境的手部图片或卡通图片时的事件相关脑电位（ERP），对此进行了调查。受试者执行一项疼痛判断任务，该任务需要关注刺激中的疼痛线索，或者执行一项将注意力从这些线索上转移开的计数任务。ERP结果显示，在感觉刺激后140毫秒，额叶上疼痛刺激和中性刺激之间出现了早期分化。在380毫秒后，在中央顶叶区域观察到了一个长潜伏期的共情反应，并且在左半球比右半球更明显。早期和晚期的共情反应分别受到刺激的情境现实和对疼痛线索的自上而下的注意力的调节。此外，140 - 180毫秒时的平均ERP振幅与对他人感知疼痛程度和自我不愉快程度的主观报告相关。ERP结果支持了一个由早期情感分享和晚期认知评估组成的疼痛共情模型。
