Pain empathy

Pain empathy is a specific subgroup of empathy that involves recognizing and understanding another person’s pain. Empathy is the mental ability that allows one person to understand another person’s mental and emotional state and how to effectively respond to that person. When a person receives cues that another person is in pain, neural pain circuits within the brain are activated. There are several cues that can communicate pain to another person: visualization of the injury causing event, the injury itself, behavioral efforts of the injured to avoid further harm, and displays of pain and distress such as facial expressions, crying, and screaming. From an evolutionary perspective, pain empathy is beneficial for human group survival since it provides motivation for non-injured people to offer aid to the injured and to avoid injury themselves. Pain empathy is a specific subgroup of empathy that involves recognizing and understanding another person’s pain. Empathy is the mental ability that allows one person to understand another person’s mental and emotional state and how to effectively respond to that person. When a person receives cues that another person is in pain, neural pain circuits within the brain are activated. There are several cues that can communicate pain to another person: visualization of the injury causing event, the injury itself, behavioral efforts of the injured to avoid further harm, and displays of pain and distress such as facial expressions, crying, and screaming. From an evolutionary perspective, pain empathy is beneficial for human group survival since it provides motivation for non-injured people to offer aid to the injured and to avoid injury themselves. Perceiving another person's affective state can cause automatic changes in brain activity in the viewer. This automatic change in brain activity is known as resonance and helps initiate an empathetic response. The inferior frontal gyrus and the inferior parietal lobule are two regions of the brain associated with empathy resonance. In order to have empathy for another person, one must understand the context of that person’s experience while maintaining a certain degree of separation from their own experience. The ability to differentiate the source of an affective stimuli as originating from the self or from other another is known as self-other discrimination. Self-other discrimination is associated with the extrastriate body area (EBA), posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), temporoparietal junction (TPJ), ventral premotor cortex, and the posterior and inferior parietal cortex. A painful facial expression is one way in which the experience of pain is communicated from one individual to another. One study aimed to measure test subject’s related brain activity and facial muscle activity when they watched video clips of a variety of facial expressions including neutral emotion, joy, fear, and pain. The study found that when a subject is shown a painful facial expression, their late positive potential (LPP) is increased during the time period of 600–1000ms after the initial exposure of the stimulus. This increase in LPP for painful facial expressions was higher than the increase caused by other emotional expressions.