Social Brain Lab, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Meibergdreef 47, 1105 BA Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Social Brain Lab, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Meibergdreef 47, 1105 BA Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Achtergracht 166, 1018 WV Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Curr Biol. 2019 Apr 22;29(8):1301-1312.e6. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.03.024. Epub 2019 Apr 11.
How do the emotions of others affect us? The human anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) responds while experiencing pain in the self and witnessing pain in others, but the underlying cellular mechanisms remain poorly understood. Here we show the rat ACC (area 24) contains neurons responding when a rat experiences pain as triggered by a laser and while witnessing another rat receive footshocks. Most of these neurons do not respond to a fear-conditioned sound (CS). Deactivating this region reduces freezing while witnessing footshocks to others but not while hearing the CS. A decoder trained on spike counts while witnessing footshocks to another rat can decode stimulus intensity both while witnessing pain in another and while experiencing the pain first-hand. Mirror-like neurons thus exist in the ACC that encode the pain of others in a code shared with first-hand pain experience. A smaller population of neurons responded to witnessing footshocks to others and while hearing the CS but not while experiencing laser-triggered pain. These differential responses suggest that the ACC may contain channels that map the distress of another animal onto a mosaic of pain- and fear-sensitive channels in the observer. More experiments are necessary to determine whether painfulness and fearfulness in particular or differences in arousal or salience are responsible for these differential responses.
他人的情绪如何影响我们？当我们自身经历疼痛或目睹他人经历疼痛时，人类的前扣带皮层（ACC）会做出反应，但背后的细胞机制仍知之甚少。在这里，我们发现当老鼠因激光而感到疼痛，或目睹另一只老鼠受到电击时，老鼠的 ACC（区域 24）包含会做出反应的神经元。这些神经元中的大多数不会对条件性恐惧声音（CS）做出反应。该区域的失活会减少在目睹他人受到电击时的冻结反应，但不会减少对 CS 的反应。在目睹另一只老鼠受到电击时对尖峰计数进行训练的解码器，可以解码另一只老鼠的疼痛强度，同时也可以解码自身直接体验到的疼痛强度。因此，镜像神经元存在于 ACC 中，它们以与第一手疼痛体验共享的代码来编码他人的疼痛。一小部分神经元对目睹他人受到电击和听到 CS 有反应，但对激光引发的疼痛没有反应。这些不同的反应表明，ACC 可能包含将另一只动物的痛苦映射到观察者的疼痛和恐惧敏感通道的镶嵌图上的通道。需要进行更多的实验来确定是疼痛和恐惧感，还是唤醒或显著性的差异导致了这些不同的反应。
