Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others

“Increased pain-related activation (asterisk indicates whole-brain corrected) for women in ACC* [9, 18, 27], left FI* [242, 15,23], right FI* [30, 18,218], left SII* [260,230, 18], right SII* [63,230, 24] and brainstem* [3,218,218]; for men in left FI* [233, 33, 3] right FI [42, 33, 3] and brainstem [3,233,230].”

“The gender difference in the comprehension of the actions’ purpose also fits with previous evidence of a greater empathic attitude in females [12,41,74–76].”

“The overall empathic response to pain can be modulated by a number of cognitive (Gu and Han, 2007; Fan and Han, 2008), affective (Singer et al., 2006; Cheng et al., 2010) and social factors (Akitsuki and Decety, 2009; Decety et al., 2010a; Hein et al., 2010; Cheon et al., 2011; Guo et al., 2012).”

“, 2001; Sande, Goethals, & Radloff, 1988), and experience the other’s putative pain as if it were their own (Singer et al., 2006).”

“For example, Singer et al. (2006) investigated whether perceived fairness of others modulates subsequent empathy-related neural”

“…picture or video stimuli of others’ body parts or faces (see Fan, Duncan, de Greck, & Northoff, 2011, for a review), research involving the imagination of another person’s pain involved interactive charcteristics but lacked real-life audiovisual stimuli (for an exception, see Singer et al., 2006).”

“Recent brain imaging studies demonstrated that human empathy for pain was modulated by social factors, such as the affective link between individuals (Singer et al., 2006), the intentionality of the perceived agency who induced the pain (Decety et al.”

“This may not only feel good—anticipating taking revenge activates reward areas in the brain (28)—but the tendency to retaliate after being offended may also be functional, allowing children to communicate their boundaries and possibly lower the risk of subsequent exploitation (18).”

“neural activity in the anterior insula and medial prefrontal cortex (Corradi-Dell’Acqua et al., 2013; Singer et al., 2006), can function as motivational factor driving the decision to cooperate or not.”

“…stimuli are more realistic (Gu and Han, 2007), when the observer is socially closer to the pain-taker (Cheng et al., 2010), belongs to the same group or race (Avenanti et al., 2010; Azevedo et al., 2013; Hein et al., 2010; Xu et al., 2009) or considers the pain-taker fair (Singer et al., 2006).”

“In a second, similar experiment (Singer et al. 2006), both females and males were scanned while they observed another individual who received painful stimuli.”

“Usually, empathy refers to the capacity to understand and share the emotional and affective states of another person in relation to oneself (Decety and Jackson, 2004; Singer et al., 2006; Hein and Singer, 2008; Guo et al., 2012, 2013).”

“, 2006), and activity in reward-related brain regions is evoked by interpersonal reciprocal exchanges (de Quervain et al., 2004; Rilling et al., 2004; Singer et al., 2006)”

“Rather, elicited feelings of empathy might vary in strength and duration, depending on the appraisal and integration of information perceived during social interaction (Hein and Singer 2008; Singer et al. 2006).”

“In an elegant demonstration of the interplay of emotional and cognitive empathy, Singer et al. (2006), had participants in a neuroimaging study observe others receiving painful stimulation, and found empathy-related brain activation within the fronto-insular and anterior cingulate cortices – a…”

“The robust evidence has indicated the empathy-related activations in salience and sensorimotor functional regions, including AI, ACC, and primary sensorimotor cortex [30, 72].”

“We further predicted that increasing concern for others would increase vicarious optimism just as it increases vicarious emotional responses to negative outcomes for others (Hein et al., 2010; Mathur, Richeson, Paice, Muzyka, & Chiao, 2014; Singer et al., 2006).”

“Embodied approach to self‑other overlap and romantic love Theories of embodiment postulate that representational codes that are specific to the body, including sensorimotor, somatosensory, and visceral codes, play an important role in human cognition and may even account for language comprehension and abstract, concep…”

“The social relation to the target person thereby is an important modulator of such vicarious responses to the emotional events in the environment (Singer et al. , 2006; Cheng et al. , 2010).”

“(2006). Tend and befriend: biobehavioral bases of affiliation under”

“The instruction to adopt another person’s perspective modulates pain rating according to the affective link between the observer and the individual experiencing the outcome (Singer et al., 2006; Penner et al., 2008).”

“NINscope: a versatile miniscope for multi-region circuit investigations. bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/685909 de Vignemont F, and Singer T (2006).”

“Females also show greater vicarious somatosensory responses to the sight or knowledge of another person in pain or distress (Singer et al., 2006; Yang et al., 2009; Groen et al., 2013; Christov-Moore et al., 2014; Christov-Moore and Iacoboni, 2019), and exhibit greater facial mimicry when viewing emotional facial expr…”

“…both in location and likely evolutionary age (with emotional empathy having earlier developmental and phylogenetic origins than cognitive empathy; Singer et al 2006) suggests that at least two separate adaptive processes are likely to have operated within the evolutionary history of human…”

“Learning affective values for faces is expressed in amygdala and fusiform gyrus”

“Brain imaging studies locate the empathic response in reaction to the perceived pain in another in the observer’s pain matrix, with especially strong activation in the anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula (Decety et al. 1997; Singer et al. 2004, 2006; Hein and Singer 2008).”

“…studies suggested that the magnitude of these empathic brain responses can be modulated by different factors, such as the perceived fairness of the other (Singer et al., 2004a, 2006) and the intensity of the inflicted pain (Avenanti et al., 2006; for a review, see de Vignemont and Singer, 2006).”

“Initially, they would complete a revised trust game to induce affective preferences (social liking vs. social disliking) in the other two students, named A and B (Singer et al., 2006).”

“In accordance with these studies, advances in neuroscience enable us to gain new insights into the neural basis of empathy (Eisenberg, 2000; Hoffman, 2001; Preston and de Waal, 2002; de Vignemont and Singer, 2006; Batson, 2009).”

“2004), and reward activity is not visible when cooperative players are punished (Singer et al. 2006).”

“…there is a relative dearth of knowledge about gender differences in empathy processing, there are some indications that compared to women, men who participated in research in which an economic game was played, showed less empathy toward unfair opponents receiving pain stimuli (Singer et al., 2006).”

“…of the brain respond to the sight of painful medical procedures performed on others depend on the observers knowledge and experience about the procedure (Lamm, Batson, & Decety, 2007) and, in the case of punishment, whether the person experiencing pain is judged to deserve it (Singer et al., 2006).”

“Empathy describes the ability to share another person’s cognitive and emotional inner life (see [25,26, 27,28,29,30, 31 ]).”

“For instance, the involvement of the insula and the cingulate cortex in human empathy (e.g., Carr et al., 2003; Singer et al., 2004, 2006) may suggest that women having an orgasm imagine how the other perceives the situation and feels as a result.”

“…by a host of factors such as top–down attention to painful cues (Gu & Han, 2007), personal experiences (Cheng et al., 2007), affective connection (Singer et al., 2006), morality salience (Luo et al., in press), socioeconomic status (Ma, Wang, & Han, 2011), and intergroup experiences (Xu et al.,…”

“For example, Singer et al. (2006) could show how important the valuation of the social target is as a modulatory factor by manipulating the perceived fairness of the social target during prior interaction.”

“, 2004), and the perceived fairness of the other person (Singer et al., 2006).”

“…experiments are modulated by the context (Gu & Han, 2007; Fan & Han, 2008), as well as by personal experiences (Cheng et al., 2007; Decety et al., 2010), and affective links with the person who suffers, including perceived fairness or group affiliation (Singer et al., 2006; Han et al., 2009).”

“However, previous studies report mixed results: unfairness-induced anger made individuals less sensitive to others’ pain (Singer et al., 2006), whereas exposure to negative words enhanced individuals’ sensitivity (Yamada and Decety, 2009), and exposure to negative facial expressions led to no effect (impacting only ne…”

“The caudate may reflect a desire to seek revenge for the suffered norm violation (Singer et al., 2006) or integrate behaviorally-relevant information for belief updating about the character of those who show norm-deviant behaviors, as this region is activated during interactions with unfair or immoral others (Harle et…”

“Neuroimaging studies have provided evidence for the direct involvement of the insular cortex in the so-called ‘‘pain matrix’’ during empathy for pain [45–53].”

“Whereas previous studies have shown particularly the ventral striatum to be sensitive to such individual differences in Schadenfreude (Singer et al., 2006; Takahashi et al., 2009), no such association was found in the present study.”

“That perceived likeability and dominance remained even when the interaction was unsuccessful suggests that such ratings are not due to a halo effect of seeing an antisocial individual punished [51,52] or due to the punisher being the recipient of indirect or strong reciprocity for carrying out a public function.”

“Discussions about acting differently depending on the perception of the target are relevant in policing, as there are some experimental indications that men react differently—essentially with reduced empathy—when observing a target categorized as ‘acting unfair’ (Singer et al., 2006).”

“Activity in these regions was found to be reduced also for the pain of perceived unfair (Singer et al., 2006), rival (Hein et al., 2010) and stigmatized (Decety et al., 2010) individuals, indicating people are less ready to share the experienceswith scarcely significant or disregarded individuals.”

“, 2008) to social emotions (Singer et al., 2006) to judgments of trustworthiness (King-Casas et al.”

“2009), even though those in pain or distress are hostile (Fukushima and Hiraki 2006) or disgraceful (Singer et al. 2006).”

“This is in line with the view that the mirror neuron system’s tendency to simulate another person’s actions and feelings is modulated by several cognitive, social and emotional factors (see [22,29,54,55]).”

“These localizations agree with a large body of literature that indicates the primary involvements of the prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices, the hippocampus [38] and the cingulate cortex [23] in emotional processing and the subjective evaluation of events and their significance [39–41].”

“For example, studies have explored the neural correlates of cognitive control andmonitoring, of complex processing concerned with social cognition, of future-planning, and, indeed, remembering the past (see for example Gilbert et al., 2006; Otten, 2006; Singer et al., 2006; Velanova et al., 2003).”

“The factors were named ‘prosociality’, ‘communication’, ‘details/patterns’ and ‘imagination’ in reference to previous literature (Austin, 2005; Hurst et al., 2007; Hoekstra et al., 2008; Stewart and Austin, 2009; Kloosterman et al., 2011).”

“, 2001), and the dACC and anterior insula are activated by direct and observed physical pain in adults (Botvinick et al., 2005; Jackson, Bruney, Meltzoff, & Decety, 2005; Morrison, Lloyd, Di Pellegrino, & Roberts, 2004; Singer et al., 2004; Singer et al., 2006) and children (Decety, Michalska, & Akitsuki, 2008).”

“, 2005), whilst knowledge about the ‘fairness’ of other people modulates empathy-related brain responses (Singer et al., 2006).”

“According to human brain imaging analyses, the strength of conscious pain, which is related to psychological condition, reflects activities of the PFC [45].”

“Several studies have indicated that this sharing of representations when observing someone else in pain can be influenced by a wide range of cognitive mechanisms, and is thus modulated by top-down processing (e.g., Cheng et al., 2007; Decety, Echols, & Correll, 2010; de Vignemont & Singer, 2006; Hein & Singer, 2008; L…”

“…showing that both pain conditions robustly engaged overlapping aIns and dACC regions (Cheng et al., 2010; Cui et al., 2015; de Vignemont and Singer, 2006; Gu et al., 2012; Jackson et al., 2006; Jackson et al., 2005; Krishnan et al., 2016; Lamm et al., 2007, 2011; Lamm and Singer, 2010;…”

“10 DONALD P. HAIDER-MARKEL AND ANDREA VIEUX similar neural spikes in activity (Singer et al. 2006).”

“Similarly, previous studies about fairnessmodulated empathy found that people got pleasure from seeing other’s suffering and experienced less pain-related empathy if the target person behaved unfairly in economic games (e.g., Singer et al., 2006).”