Pain and social decision-making: New insights from the social framing effect
Open accessAbstract
This paper focuses on the social function of painful experience as revealed by recent studies on social decision-making. Observing others suffering from physical pain evokes empathic reactions that can lead to prosocial behavior (e.g., helping others at a cost to oneself), which might be regarded as the social value of pain derived from evolution. Feelings of guilt may also be elicited when one takes responsibility for another’s pain. These social emotions play a significant role in various cognitive processes and may affect behavioral preferences. In addition, the influence of others’ pain on decision-making is highly sensitive to social context. Combining neuroimaging techniques with a novel decision paradigm, we found that when asking participants to trade-off personal benefits against providing help to other people, verbally describing the causal relationship between their decision and other people’s pain (i.e., framing) significantly changed participants’ preferences. This social framing effect was associated with neural activation in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), which is a brain area that is important in social cognition and in social emotions. Further, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on this region successfully modulated the magnitude of the social framing effect. These findings add to the knowledge about the role of perception of others’ pain in our social life.
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Pain-processing areas of the brain can be activated by social rejection or by observing another individual in pain, and the intensity of such empathetic pain correlates with social closeness to the partner.
“Pain-processing areas of the brain can be activated not only by stimuli that are directly (or potentially) physically harmful, but also by social rejection [51] or by observing another individual in pain [52], and the intensity of such empathetic pain correlates with social closeness to the partner (reviewed in [53]).”
From The social origins of consciousness (2025) · cites this paper as [53]
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Self-citationHartmann, H., Orlando, E., Borja, K., Keysers, C., & Gazzola, V. (2023) · doi:10.31219/osf.io/wb3cq
- Authors
- Gu, R., Liu, J., & Cui, F.
- Affiliations
- Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
- Shenzhen University (CN)
- Corresponding author
- Cui, Fang
- Venue
- Brain Science Advances
- Publisher
- Tsinghua University Press
- Published
- 2019-12
- Volume
- 5
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 221-238
- ISSN
- 2096-5958 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3017374925
- Cited by
- 18
- References
- 157
- Citations by year
- 2025: 1 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 5
- FWCI
- 4.09
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- diamond
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Brain Science Advances (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Action Observation and Synchronization
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
- Keywords
- social decision-making, pain perception, empathy, prosocial behavior, guilt, temporoparietal junction, transcranial direct current stimulation, social emotions, helping behavior, social cognition
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