Different Neural Network of Racial in-group and out-group in Empathy for Pain

Wednesday, 17 de June de 2020

En este interesante estudio [1], los investigadores se plantearon si la percepción del dolor ajeno se ve afectada por pertenecer o no a un grupo racial determinado. Aportando al debate necesario para generar sociedades más inclusivas.

Perceived race modulates multiple neural networks involved in empathy for pain. EEG fMRI have shown that perceiving physical pain from same-race (SR) vs. other-race (OR) individuals elicited stronger neural responses in motor-sensory, affective, and theory-of-mind networks (Stimulus Presentation).

However, the exact time courses of empathic neural responses differentiating SR- and OR-pain in these networks remain unclear (Cultural Neuroscience). We investigate empathic neural responses to dynamic pain expressions induced by painful stimulation (Behavioral Research Lab).

Methods:

22 Chinese students (all males, mean age±SD = 22.45±2.18 yrs.). Stimuli consisted of 80 video clips (Xu et al., 2009) which contain 10 Asian (5 males and 5 females) and 10 Caucasian models (5 males and 5 females).

There were 4 video clips for each model in which he/she received painful (needle penetration) or non-painful (Q-tip touch) stimuli applied to the left or right cheeks while showing neutral/painful expressions. Each video clips lasted for 1s and were presented once in a random order in each block (6 blocks of 80 trials).

There was a 3s interstimulus interval between two successive video clips during which participants fixated on a central cross. Participants were asked to perform race judgments (Asian vs. White) with a button press, buttons were counterbalanced across different blocks.

After recording, participants viewed all the clips again outside the room and rated the intensity of pain experienced by each model ("How painful do you think the model feels?") and their own unpleasantness associated with the stimuli ("How unpleasant do you feel after observing the video clip?").

Data were epoched from -200 to 1500 ms for data analysis. Coregistration between the individual anatomy and sensors was conducted before source analyses. For the group-level analysis, individual source-space data were projected to a standard brain model (Colin27, 15,002 vertices).

The activity of each vertex over the time-windows was averaged and exported to SPM12 for subsequent statistical analyses by combining a vertex-level threshold of p < 0.005 and a cluster-level threshold of p < 0.05, FWE corrected.

Results:

Response accuracies were all above 70% and rating scores of pain intensity and own unpleasantness were higher for painful than non-painful stimuli, but did not differ between SR- and OR-pain.
Sensor-space signals revealed stronger neural responses to painful vs. non-painful stimuli at early stage (90-270 ms) for SR- but not OR-stimuli, both SR- and OR-stimuli showed stronger neural responses to painful vs. non-painful stimuli at later stage (after 500ms).

Source analyses revealed that activation in the left motor cortex (90-140 ms), later right OFC expanded to ventral ACC (140-270 ms), and right STS and right IPC (90-270 ms) in response to SR-pain. SR-pain also activated the left SPC expanded to PCC and right STS at a later stage (700-800ms and 980-1150ms)(Figure 1A). Viewing OR-pain, however, only activated the right STS and right motor cortex (570-630 ms) and left STS (1000-1050 ms)(Figure 1B). Finally, stronger pain related right IPC activity at early stage (90-140 ms) to SR was positively correlated with subjective feelings of SR-pain (r = 0.445, p = 0.04).

Conclusions:

Our finding suggests that different neural networks are involved when viewing SR- and OR-pain. Perceiving SR-models in a dynamic painful condition initially engages the motor cortex followed by the involvement of neural networks of expression processing and affective sharing. Viewing OR-pain focuses on the processing of facial expression but lacks affective sharing.

References

1- Chenyu Pang, Yuqing Zhou, Shihui Han. (2019). Different Neural Network of Racial in-group and out-group in Empathy for Pain.

2- Han, 2018;Xu et al., 2009;Tadel et al., 2011

The content published here is the exclusive responsibility of the authors.

Autor: Sebastian Moguilner

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