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Embodied empathy for pain| old_uid | 6835 |
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| title | Embodied empathy for pain |
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| start_date | 2009/04/30 |
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| schedule | 09h30 |
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| online | no |
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| summary | Studies indicate that imagining or seeing other individuals in pain may
trigger an empathic mapping of the others? physical and emotional state. At least two forms of empathy for pain can be postulated. The first, possibly based on affective resonance, may deal with emotional sharing and with the evaluation of social bonds and interpersonal relations. The second, based on somatomotor resonance, may be primarily concerned with mapping external stimuli onto one?s own body. Here we report a series of transcranial magnetic stimulation studies investigating the sensorimotor side of empathy for pain. We report that healthy individuals observing needles penetrating hands or feet of a human model present a consistent amplitude reduction of motor evoked potentials, which was specific to observation of the pricked muscle. This inhibition correlated with the observer?s subjective rating of the sensory qualities of the pain attributed to the model and with sensory but not emotional state- or trait- empathy measures. The inhibitory effect, which can be considered an index of pain resonance between onlooker and model, is lacking in individuals with Asperger Syndrome. This indicates that their empathic difficulties do not only involve cognitive-affective dimensions but also in the basic embodied sensorimotor resonance with others. |
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| oncancel | Nouveau, horaire |
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| responsibles | Béranger, Dreher |
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