Project

Discipline

Brain imaging; Emotion; Empathy; Insula; Human

Lead
Lay summary
This project investigates the human brain circuits involved in empathy and understanding other people and their emotions. In particular, we study the role of the anterior insula, a cortical region that has been observed to activate both whilst feeling a given emotion and when observing someone else feeling the same emotion (especially pain). However, this region also activates in other emotional and motivational conditions unrelated to empathy and pain. Therefore, its exact function and nature of its activation during pain observation still remains to be fully understood. Our aims is to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with advanced statistical analysis to explore the nature of information represented in human anterior insula during different emotion perception, anticipation, and regulation conditions. In particular, we will test whether this brain area (and other interconnected regions) code for predictive signals of affective relevance or instead for specific somatic aspects of pain; and to which extent (or in which conditions) the same representations are shared for self (felt) pain and others’ (seen) pain. This work will not only contribute to reveal how humans are able to understand and share emotions in other people, but also shed light on insula functions.

Direct link to Lay Summary

Last update: 21.02.2013

Communication	Title	Media	Place	Year

Number	Title	Start	Funding scheme

The investigation of the neural underpinnings of empathy and, more generally, of those processes involved in understanding other people and their emotions, is a central and fascinating issue in cognitive and affective neurosciences. A number of pioneer studies in the last decade has suggested the existence of shared emotional representations in the human brain which are active both whilst feeling a given emotion and when observing someone else feeling the same emotion. The most consistent and extensively investigated case of shared emotional response concerns the anterior insula, typically active when feeling pain but also when seeing pain delivered to others. This groundbreaking research has also raised several new issues. In particular, although the human anterior insula is critically linked to empathy for pain, its exact function and nature of its activation during pain observation still remains to be fully understood. Further research is needed to (1) determine the predictive nature of representations in the anterior insula and their relation to specific somatic aspects of pain, (2) examine the extent of shared representations for self (felt) pain and others’ (seen) pain at a fine-grained neural level, and (3) identify factors that modulate the shared responses as a function of individual variables such as personal empathy skills and interpersonal relationships. The main purpose of this project is to carefully investigate the functional role of the anterior insula and related brain structures and, specifically, to address these three critical questions by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in healthy volunteers and applying novel experimental paradigms with advanced multivariate voxel pattern analysis (MVPA).We first plan to explore the predictive nature of pain representations in the anterior insula (AI). Previous studies reported enhanced insula activation when an arbitrary cue informs about the noxiousness of an upcoming stimulation. We will extend these results by investigating whether predictive representations in AI hold information about the specific somatic content of noxious situations. To this aim, we will measure brain responses and pain ratings to noxious sensations and preceding cues that are informative, not only about the presence of pain, but also about its modality (thermal vs mechanical). This manipulation will enable us to identify activation patterns associated with specific noxious sensations, and test whether these are also evoked by the presence of a context-relevant cue (prior to actual delivery) with the same voxel-by-voxel specificity. Second, we plan to test whether the (possibly predictive) representations of pain in AI (and other regions such as somatosensory cortex) are shared, that is, similarly activated when the person in pain is not oneself but someone else. Unlike previous studies demonstrating shared structures macroscopically (in terms of regional cluster overlaps), we will employ novel multivariate patterns analysis techniques, which can nowadays gather inference from fMRI data at the sub-voxel resolution. By testing whether representations of specific noxious sensation are indeed shared at a fine-grained neural level (voxel-by-voxel), including for specific somatic modality of pain (thermal vs mechanical), our study should provide unprecedented evidence for the existence of shared representations of pain, and furthermore reveal whether these are sufficiently specific to code for one particular kind of noxious event, and yet sufficiently general to be recruited irrespective of whether painful states concern oneself or another person. Alternatively, shared representations in AI might essentially code for pain and threat events (or their prediction), without distinguishing between the specific somatic modalities. Finally, in the third step of the project, we will assess whether the degree to which a representation in AI (or somatosensory areas) is shared with others might be modulated by contextual factors such as the intimacy with the other person, as well as by individual characteristics related to empathy skills in close interpersonal relationships that will be assessed by ecological procedure.Beyond scientific goals, our project is envisioned as a unique opportunity to create new links between core members of the NCCR Affective Sciences in Geneva and other researchers in psychology, which will serve to strengthen multidisciplinary exchanges and further promote research expertise on empathy-related processes at the national Swiss level. Altogether, this will promote a network of expertise in this field, and strengthen inter-disciplinary and inter-institutional exchanges of the NCCR.