Travassos Carolina, Sayal Alexandre, Direito Bruno, Castelhano João, Castelo-Branco Miguel
Coimbra Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Translational Research (CIBIT), University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal.
Institute of Nuclear Sciences Applied to Health (ICNAS), University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal.
Front Neurol. 2020 Jul 21;11:714. doi: 10.3389/fneur.2020.00714. eCollection 2020.
The ability to perceive and feel another person' pain as if it were one's own pain, e.g., pain empathy, is related to brain activity in the "pain-matrix" network. A non-core region of this network in Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC) has been suggested as a modulator of the attentional-cognitive dimensions of pain processing in the context of pain empathy. We conducted a neurofeedback experiment using real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (rt-fMRI-NF) to investigate the association between activity in the left DLPFC (our neurofeedback target area) and the perspective assumed by the participant ("first-person"/"Self" or "third-person"/"Other" perspective of a pain-inducing stimulus), based on a customized pain empathy task. Our main goals were to assess the participants' ability to volitionally modulate activity in their own DLPFC through an imagery task of pain empathy and to investigate into which extent this ability depends on feedback. Our results demonstrate participants' ability to significantly modulate brain activity of the neurofeedback target area for the "first-person"/"Self" and "third-person"/"Other" perspectives. Results of both perspectives show that the participants were able to modulate (with statistical significance) the activity already in the first run of the session, in spite of being naïve to the task and even in the absence of feedback information. Moreover, they improved modulation throughout the session, particularly in the "Self" perspective. These results provide new insights on the role of DLPFC in pain and pain empathy mechanisms and validate the proposed protocol, paving the way for future interventional studies in clinical populations with empathic deficits.
将他人的疼痛如同自身疼痛般感知和感受的能力，例如疼痛共情，与“疼痛矩阵”网络中的大脑活动相关。背外侧前额叶皮质（DLPFC）中该网络的一个非核心区域被认为是在疼痛共情背景下疼痛处理的注意力 - 认知维度的调节因子。我们使用实时功能磁共振成像（rt - fMRI - NF）进行了一项神经反馈实验，基于定制的疼痛共情任务，研究左DLPFC（我们的神经反馈目标区域）的活动与参与者所采取的视角（疼痛诱发刺激的“第一人称”/“自我”或“第三人称”/“他人”视角）之间的关联。我们的主要目标是评估参与者通过疼痛共情的想象任务自主调节自身DLPFC活动的能力，并研究这种能力在多大程度上依赖于反馈。我们的结果表明，参与者能够在“第一人称”/“自我”和“第三人称”/“他人”视角下显著调节神经反馈目标区域的大脑活动。两种视角的结果均显示，尽管参与者对任务不熟悉且甚至在没有反馈信息的情况下，他们在会话的第一轮中就能够（具有统计学意义地）调节活动。此外，他们在整个会话过程中改善了调节，特别是在“自我”视角下。这些结果为DLPFC在疼痛和疼痛共情机制中的作用提供了新的见解，并验证了所提出的方案，为未来对有共情缺陷的临床人群进行干预研究铺平了道路。
