seeker wrote:I'd like to know more examples of correlations between psychological kinds of experiences and neural kinds of events, and the sources of their evidence
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(In this thread, I'm more interested in the sources of the empirical evidence, than in the theoretical and philosophical aspects of this issue).
I’m not sure if this counts, I’m linking to two neural imaging studies not about the areas of the brain involved in feeling pain, but the areas of the brain involved in thinking about other people’s pain. It’s the experience of thinking other people have experiences.
Both sets of experiments have the same lead researcher, Jean Decety. The first looks at the brain regions which are shared, which light up both when the individual is in pain and when they are thinking about someone else in pain. It also looks at the regions involved in empathy which are not shared, as a brain will need to make a distinction between self and other, even if it is using some of the same processes to understand both. The second article looks at the differences between normal people and people with psychopathy (who show less empathy than normal). When people with psychopathy are asked to imagine themselves in pain, the regions of their brains which light up are those which light up in normal people who are thinking about other people’s pain (and their own). By contrast, when people with psychopathy are asked to imagine someone else’s pain, an atypical pattern of neural activation is seen.
(1) A
2006 paper entitled “A Social-Neuroscience Perspective on Empathy”, by Jean Decety and Philip L. Jackson (curly brackets mine):
Decety and Jackson wrote:The expression of pain provides a crucial signal that can motivate helping behaviors in others. Finding out how individuals perceive others in pain is this an interesting way to decipher the underlying neural mechanisms of empathy. Recently, a handful of fMRI studies have indicated that the observation of pain in others is mediated by several brain areas that are implicated in processing the affective and motivational aspects of one's own pain. In one study, participants received painful stimuli and observed signals indicating that their partner, who was present in the same room, had received the same stimuli (Singer et al., 2004). The rostral (or anterior) ACC {anterior cingulate cortex}, the insula, and the cerebellum were active during both conditions. in another study, participants were shown photographs depicting body parts in painful or neutral everyday-life situations, and were asked to imagine the level of pain those situations would produce (Jackson, Meltzoff, and Decety, 2005). In comparison to neutral situations, painful conditions elicited significant activation in regions involved in the affective aspects of pain processing, notably the ACC and the interior insula.
(2) A
2013 article, “An fMRI study of affective perspective taking in individuals with psychopathy: imagining another in pain does not evoke empathy”, by Jean Decety, Chenyi Chen, Carla Harenski and Kent A. Kiehl:
Decety et al wrote:While it is well established that individuals with psychopathy have a marked deficit in affective arousal, emotional empathy, and caring for the well-being of others, the extent to which perspective taking can elicit an emotional response has not yet been studied despite its potential application in rehabilitation. In healthy individuals, affective perspective taking has proven to be an effective means to elicit empathy and concern for others. To examine neural responses in individuals who vary in psychopathy during affective perspective taking, 121 incarcerated males, classified as high (n = 37; Hare psychopathy checklist-revised, PCL-R ≥ 30), intermediate (n = 44; PCL-R between 21 and 29), and low (n = 40; PCL-R ≤ 20) psychopaths, were scanned while viewing stimuli depicting bodily injuries and adopting an imagine-self and an imagine-other perspective. During the imagine-self perspective, participants with high psychopathy showed a typical response within the network involved in empathy for pain, including the anterior insula (aINS), anterior midcingulate cortex (aMCC), supplementary motor area (SMA), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), somatosensory cortex, and right amygdala. Conversely, during the imagine-other perspective, psychopaths exhibited an atypical pattern of brain activation and effective connectivity seeded in the anterior insula and amygdala with the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC).
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Empathy, the social-emotional response that is induced by the perception of another person's affective state, is a fundamental component of emotional experience, and plays a vital role in social interaction (Szalavitz and Perry, 2010). It is thought to be a proxy for prosocial behavior, guiding our social preferences and providing the affective and motivational base for moral development. Empathy is a deeply fundamental component of healthy co-existence whose absence is the hallmark of serious social-cognitive dysfunctions. Among the various psychopathologies marked by such deficits, psychopaths are characterized by a general lack of empathy and attenuated responding to emotional stimuli (Blair et al., 1997; Herpertz and Sass, 2000; Hare, 2003; Mahmut et al., 2008).