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Pain Processing in a Social Context and the Link with Psychopathic Personality Traits-An Event-Related Potential Study.

ABSTRACT: Empathy describes the ability to understand another person's feelings. Psychopathy is a disorder that is characterized by a lack of empathy. Therefore, empathy and psychopathy are interesting traits to investigate with respect to experiencing and observing pain. The present study aimed to investigate pain empathy and pain sensitivity by measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) extracted from the ongoing EEG in an interactive setup. Each participant fulfilled subsequently the role of "villain" and "victim". In addition, mode of control was modulated resulting in four different conditions; passive villain, active villain, active victim and passive victim. Response-, visual- and pain ERPs were compared between the four conditions. Furthermore, the role of psychopathic traits in these outcomes was investigated. Our findings suggested that people experience more conflict when hurting someone else than hurting themselves. Furthermore, our results indicated that self-controlled pain was experienced as more painful than uncontrolled pain. People that scored high on psychopathic traits seemed to process and experience pain differently. According to the results of the current study, social context, attention and personality traits seem to modulate pain processing and the empathic response to pain in self and others. The within-subject experimental design described here provides an excellent approach to further unravel the influence of social context and personality traits on social cognition.

SUBMITTER: van Heck CH

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5622147 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Pain Processing in a Social Context and the Link with Psychopathic Personality Traits-An Event-Related Potential Study.

van Heck Casper H CH Driessen Josi M A JMA Amato Maria M van den Berg Marnou N MN Bhandari Pritha P Bilbao-Broch Laura L Farres-Casals Jordi J Hendriks Manon M Jodzio Adrian C AC Luque-Ballesteros Laura L Schöchl Christina C Velasco-Angeles Laura R LR Weijer Roel H A RHA van Rijn Clementina M CM Jongsma Marijtje L A MLA

Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience 20170925

Empathy describes the ability to understand another person's feelings. Psychopathy is a disorder that is characterized by a lack of empathy. Therefore, empathy and psychopathy are interesting traits to investigate with respect to experiencing and observing pain. The present study aimed to investigate pain empathy and pain sensitivity by measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) extracted from the ongoing EEG in an interactive setup. Each participant fulfilled subsequently the role of "villain" a ...[more]

PMID: 28993727

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Project description:ObjectiveThere is a general agreement that physical pain serves as an alarm signal for the prevention of and reaction to physical harm. It has recently been hypothesized that "social pain," as induced by social rejection or abandonment, may rely on comparable, phylogenetically old brain structures. As plausible as this theory may sound, scientific evidence for this idea is sparse. This study therefore attempts to link both types of pain directly. We studied patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) because BPD is characterized by opposing alterations in physical and social pain; hyposensitivity to physical pain is associated with hypersensitivity to social pain, as indicated by an enhanced rejection sensitivity.MethodTwenty unmedicated female BPD patients and 20 healthy participants (HC, matched for age and education) played a virtual ball-tossing game (cyberball), with the conditions for exclusion, inclusion, and a control condition with predefined game rules. Each cyberball block was followed by a temperature stimulus (with a subjective pain intensity of 60% in half the cases). The cerebral responses were measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging. The Adult Rejection Sensitivity Questionnaire was used to assess rejection sensitivity.ResultsHigher temperature heat stimuli had to be applied to BPD patients relative to HCs to reach a comparable subjective experience of painfulness in both groups, which suggested a general hyposensitivity to pain in BPD patients. Social exclusion led to a subjectively reported hypersensitivity to physical pain in both groups that was accompanied by an enhanced activation in the anterior insula and the thalamus. In BPD, physical pain processing after exclusion was additionally linked to enhanced posterior insula activation. After inclusion, BPD patients showed reduced amygdala activation during pain in comparison with HC. In BPD patients, higher rejection sensitivity was associated with lower activation differences during pain processing following social exclusion and inclusion in the insula and in the amygdala.DiscussionDespite the similar behavioral effects in both groups, BPD patients differed from HC in their neural processing of physical pain depending on the preceding social situation. Rejection sensitivity further modulated the impact of social exclusion on neural pain processing in BPD, but not in healthy controls.

Dataset Information

Pain Processing in a Social Context and the Link with Psychopathic Personality Traits-An Event-Related Potential Study.

Publications

Pain Processing in a Social Context and the Link with Psychopathic Personality Traits-An Event-Related Potential Study.

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