Department of Neuroscience, University of Turin Medical School, Turin, Italy.
Plateau Rosa Laboratories, Zermatt, Switzerland.
Psychophysiology. 2020 Dec;57(12):e13666. doi: 10.1111/psyp.13666. Epub 2020 Aug 17.
Expectations and motor reactions related to pain are mainly acquired through personal experiences. Contingent negative variation (CNV) has been shown to be an informative electrophysiological measure of this pain anticipation. Expectations can also arise while observing others in painful conditions. However, it still remains unclear what are the neural correlates of this phenomenon and how the observation of others in pain can subsequently change our personal pain perception as well as our motor reaction to pain. Using CNV as a measure of expectation, this study aims to assess whether expectations formed through observation change the observer's own experience of pain and reaction to pain. A new cooperative task was designed where one participant, the model, received an electrical stimulation while another, the observer, watched the experiment and both were asked to stop the stimulation as fast as possible. Crucially, in a successive session, participants inverted their roles so that models became observers and vice versa. CNV was recorded in both participants simultaneously by means of two synchronized electroencephalograms. Results showed that CNV area did not differ between models and observers and reaction times were significantly faster in observers compared to models. Moreover, observers' pain perception was correlated to models' pain perception as well as to observers' empathy scores. These data show how expectations, perceptions as well as reactions related to pain are crucially affected not only by observation but by personal attitudes toward others and all these changes can be clearly described through CNV.
期待和与疼痛相关的运动反应主要通过个人经验获得。条件性负变（CNV）已被证明是一种信息丰富的电生理测量方法，可以预测疼痛的发生。当观察他人处于疼痛状态时，也会产生期待。然而，目前尚不清楚这种现象的神经相关性是什么，以及观察他人的疼痛如何随后改变我们个人的疼痛感知以及对疼痛的运动反应。本研究使用 CNV 作为预期的衡量标准，旨在评估通过观察形成的预期是否会改变观察者自身的疼痛体验和对疼痛的反应。设计了一个新的合作任务，其中一名参与者（模型）在另一名参与者（观察者）观看实验的同时接受电刺激，然后要求他们尽快停止刺激。至关重要的是，在随后的一次会议中，参与者互换了角色，模型变成了观察者，反之亦然。通过两个同步的脑电图同时记录了两名参与者的 CNV。结果表明，模型和观察者的 CNV 面积没有差异，观察者的反应时间明显快于模型。此外，观察者的疼痛感知与模型的疼痛感知以及观察者的同理心评分相关。这些数据表明，与疼痛相关的期望、感知和反应不仅受到观察的影响，还受到个人对他人的态度的影响，所有这些变化都可以通过 CNV 清楚地描述。
