Healthcare experience affects pain-specific responses to others' suffering in the anterior insula.
Hum Brain Mapp
; 44(17): 5655-5671, 2023 12 01.
Article
en En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-37608624
ABSTRACT
Medical students and professional healthcare providers often underestimate patients' pain, together with decreased neural responses to pain information in the anterior insula (AI), a brain region implicated in self-pain processing and negative affect. However, the functional significance and specificity of these neural changes remains debated. Across two experiments, we recruited university medical students and emergency nurses to test the role of healthcare experience on the brain reactivity to other's pain, emotions, and beliefs, using both pictorial and verbal cues. Brain responses to self-pain was also assessed and compared with those to observed pain. Our results confirmed that healthcare experience decreased the activity in AI in response to others' suffering. This effect was independent from stimulus modality (pictures or texts), but specific for pain, as it did not generalize to inferences about other mental or affective states. Furthermore, representational similarity and multivariate pattern analysis revealed that healthcare experience impacted specifically a component of the neural representation of others' pain that is shared with that of first-hand nociception, and related more to AI than to other pain-responsive regions. Taken together, our study suggests a decreased propensity to appraise others' suffering as one's own, associated with a reduced recruitment of pain-specific information in AI. These findings provide new insights into neural mechanisms leading to pain underestimation by caregivers in clinical settings.
Palabras clave
Texto completo:
1
Colección:
01-internacional
Banco de datos:
MEDLINE
Asunto principal:
Emociones
/
Empatía
Límite:
Humans
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Hum Brain Mapp
Asunto de la revista:
CEREBRO
Año:
2023
Tipo del documento:
Article
País de afiliación:
Suiza