Felt and Seen Pain Evoke the Same Local Patterns of Cortical Activity in Insular and Cingulate Cortex
Felt and Seen Pain Evoke the Same Local Patterns of Cortical Activity in Insular and Cingulate Cortex
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DOI：
10.1523/jneurosci.2686-11.2011
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发表时间：
2011-12-07
影响因子：
5.3
通讯作者：
Vuilleumier, Patrik
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Corradi-Dell'Acqua, Corrado;Hofstetter, Christoph;Vuilleumier, Patrik
人类大脑中区域的发现（例如，在直接接触疼痛和感知他人疼痛时都会激活的神经元（大脑皮层和扣带皮层）被解释为共情的神经信号。然而，这种重叠提出了一个问题，它是否可能反映了一个独特的双峰神经元分布的人口，或者，混合但独立的人口的活动。我们对28名女性志愿者进行了功能磁共振成像，并使用多变量模式分析技术来探索所看到和感受到的疼痛的更细粒度的空间表示。使用全脑的方法，我们发现，只有在前额叶（双侧）的皮质活动的分布引起的看到另一个人的手在痛苦的空间相似，在自己的手上感到疼痛。随后的感兴趣区域分析也涉及到中脑（右半球）和中扣带皮层。此外，对于前额叶，与疼痛相关的活动的空间分布也复制了对负面但无痛刺激的感知。我们的数据显示，当同样的事件影响他人时，影响自己的厌恶事件的神经表征也会被招募，并提供了迄今为止更有力的证据，证明无论受影响的受试者是谁，厌恶事件都有一个独特的分布式皮质系综编码。
The discovery of regions in the human brain (e.g., insula and cingulate cortex) that activate both under direct exposure to pain and when perceiving pain in others has been interpreted as a neural signature of empathy. However, this overlap raises the question of whether it may reflect a unique distributed population of bimodal neurons or, alternatively, the activity of intermingled but independent populations. We used fMRI on 28 female volunteers and used multivariate pattern analysis techniques to probe for more fine-grain spatial representations of seen and felt pain. Using a whole-brain approach, we found that only in the anterior insula (bilaterally) the distribution of cortical activity evoked by seeing another person's hand in pain was spatially similar to that of pain felt on one's own hand. Subsequent region of interest analyses also implicated the middle insula (right hemisphere) and the middle cingulate cortex. Furthermore, for the anterior insula, the spatial distribution of activity associated with one's pain also replicates that of the perception of negative but painless stimuli. Our data show how the neural representations of aversive events affecting oneself are also recruited when the same events affect others, and provide the stronger evidence thus far of a unique distributed cortical ensemble coding for aversive events regardless of the subject who is affected.