Feng Chunliang, Li Zhihao, Feng Xue, Wang Lili, Tian Tengxiang, Luo Yue-Jia
Institute of Affective and Social Neuroscience, School of Psychology and Sociology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China, State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China, and.
Institute of Affective and Social Neuroscience, School of Psychology and Sociology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2016 Mar;11(3):485-95. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsv135. Epub 2015 Oct 29.
Recent evidence indicates that empathic responses to others' pain are modulated by various situational and individual factors. However, few studies have examined how empathy and underlying brain functions are modulated by social hierarchies, which permeate human society with an enormous impact on social behavior and cognition. In this study, social hierarchies were established based on incidental skill in a perceptual task in which all participants were mediumly ranked. Afterwards, participants were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging while watching inferior-status or superior-status targets receiving painful or non-painful stimulation. The results revealed that painful stimulation applied to inferior-status targets induced higher activations in the anterior insula (AI) and anterior medial cingulate cortex (aMCC), whereas these empathic brain activations were significantly attenuated in response to superior-status targets' pain. Further, this neural empathic bias to inferior-status targets was accompanied by stronger functional couplings of AI with brain regions important in emotional processing (i.e. thalamus) and cognitive control (i.e. middle frontal gyrus). Our findings indicate that emotional sharing with others' pain is shaped by relative positions in a social hierarchy such that underlying empathic neural responses are biased toward inferior-status compared with superior-status individuals.
近期证据表明，对他人痛苦的共情反应会受到各种情境和个体因素的调节。然而，很少有研究探讨社会等级制度如何调节共情及潜在的大脑功能，社会等级制度渗透于人类社会，对社会行为和认知有着巨大影响。在本研究中，基于一项感知任务中的偶然技能建立了社会等级制度，所有参与者在该任务中的排名中等。之后，参与者在观看地位较低或较高的目标接受疼痛或非疼痛刺激时，接受功能磁共振成像扫描。结果显示，施加于地位较低目标的疼痛刺激在前脑岛（AI）和前扣带回中部皮质（aMCC）中诱发了更高的激活，而这些共情大脑激活在对地位较高目标的疼痛反应中显著减弱。此外，这种对地位较低目标的神经共情偏差伴随着AI与情绪处理（即丘脑）和认知控制（即额中回）中重要脑区之间更强的功能耦合。我们的研究结果表明，与他人痛苦的情感共享受到社会等级制度中相对地位的影响，使得潜在的共情神经反应相对于地位较高的个体更偏向于地位较低的个体。
