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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on February 22, 2006
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhj141
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Article

The Compassionate Brain: Humans Detect Intensity of Pain from Another's Face

Miiamaaria V. Saarela 1 *, Yevhen Hlushchuk 1, Amanda C. de C. Williams 2, Martin Schürmann 1, Eija Kalso 3, and Riitta Hari 4

1 Brain Research Unit, Low Temperature Laboratory, Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland; Advanced Magnetic Imaging Centre, Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland
2 Department of Psychology, University College London, London, UK
3 Pain Clinic, Department of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care Medicine, Helsinki University Central Hospital, Helsinki, Finland
4 Brain Research Unit, Low Temperature Laboratory, Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland; Advanced Magnetic Imaging Centre, Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland; Department of Clinical Neurophysiology, Helsinki University Central Hospital, Helsinki, Finland

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Miiamaaria V. Saarela, E-mail: miiu{at}neuro.hut.fi


  Abstract

Understanding another person's experience draws on "mirroring systems," brain circuitries shared by the subject's own actions/feelings and by similar states observed in others. Lately, also the experience of pain has been shown to activate partly the same brain areas in the subjects' own and in the observer's brain. Recent studies show remarkable overlap between brain areas activated when a subject undergoes painful sensory stimulation and when he/she observes others suffering from pain. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we show that not only the presence of pain but also the intensity of the observed pain is encoded in the observer's brain--as occurs during the observer's own pain experience. When subjects observed pain from the faces of chronic pain patients, activations in bilateral anterior insula (AI), left anterior cingulate cortex, and left inferior parietal lobe in the observer's brain correlated with their estimates of the intensity of observed pain. Furthermore, the strengths of activation in the left AI and left inferior frontal gyrus during observation of intensified pain correlated with subjects' self-rated empathy. These findings imply that the intersubjective representation of pain in the human brain is more detailed than has been previously thought.

Keywords: anterior cingulate cortex; anterior insula; empathy; face; intensity; pain.
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