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Do You Feel My Pain? Racial Group Membership Modulates Empathic Neural Responses
Open accessAbstract
The pain matrix including the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) mediates not only first person pain experience but also empathy for others' pain. It remains unknown, however, whether empathic neural responses of the pain matrix are modulated by racial in-group/out-group relationship. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging we demonstrate that, whereas painful stimulations applied to racial in-group faces induced increased activations in the ACC and inferior frontal/insula cortex in both Caucasians and Chinese, the empathic neural response in the ACC decreased significantly when participants viewed faces of other races. Our findings uncover neural mechanisms of an empathic bias toward racial in-group members.
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“In the motor domain, participants show reduced vicarious activation of the motor cortex when observing actions performed by a racial outgroup member as compared to an ingroup member [4,8], and show decreased neural and motor responses when viewing racial outgroup members in pain [3,6].”
From Changing bodies changes minds: Owning another body affects social cognition (2015) · cites this paper as [6]
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Metadata
- Authors
- Xu, X., Zuo, X., Wang, X., & Han, S.
- Affiliations
- Peking University (CN)
- Peking University First Hospital (CN)
- ORCID
- Han, S.
- Venue
- Journal of Neuroscience
- Publisher
- Society for Neuroscience
- Published
- 2009-07-01
- Volume
- 29
- Issue
- 26
- Pages
- 8525-8529
- ISSN
- 0270-6474 (ISSN-L)
- 1529-2401
- PMC
- PMC6665679
- OpenAlex
- W2121004914
- Cited by
- 798
- References
- 19
- Citations by year
- 2026: 23 · 2025: 31 · 2024: 47 · 2023: 60 · 2022: 51 · 2021: 79 · 2020: 62 · 2019: 46 · 2018: 40 · 2017: 35 · 2016: 38 · 2015: 55 · 2014: 47 · 2013: 76 · 2012: 37
- FWCI
- 116.45
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Journal of Neuroscience (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social and Intergroup Psychology
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Action Observation and Synchronization
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Face Recognition and Perception
- Keywords
- empathy for pain, anterior cingulate cortex, pain matrix, insula, inferior frontal cortex, intergroup perception, cross-cultural comparison
- MeSH terms
- Carbamide Peroxide, Adult, Analysis of Variance, Brain Mapping, Cerebral Cortex, Drug Combinations, Empathy, Ethnicity, Female, Humans, Image Processing, Computer-Assisted, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Pain, Pain Measurement, Peroxides, Photic Stimulation, Urea, Pain Threshold, Young Adult
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