Anterior cingulate inputs to nucleus accumbens control the social transfer of pain and analgesia.
Monique L SmithNaoyuki AsadaRobert C MalenkaPublished in: Science (New York, N.Y.) (2021)
Empathy is an essential component of social communication that involves experiencing others' sensory and emotional states. We observed that a brief social interaction with a mouse experiencing pain or morphine analgesia resulted in the transfer of these experiences to its social partner. Optogenetic manipulations demonstrated that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and its projections to the nucleus accumbens (NAc) were selectively involved in the social transfer of both pain and analgesia. By contrast, the ACC→NAc circuit was not necessary for the social transfer of fear, which instead depended on ACC projections to the basolateral amygdala. These findings reveal that the ACC, a brain area strongly implicated in human empathic responses, mediates distinct forms of empathy in mice by influencing different downstream targets.
Keyphrases
- pain management
- mental health
- healthcare
- chronic pain
- functional connectivity
- resting state
- postoperative pain
- endothelial cells
- neuropathic pain
- transcription factor
- type diabetes
- ultrasound guided
- computed tomography
- metabolic syndrome
- gene expression
- prefrontal cortex
- skeletal muscle
- contrast enhanced
- brain injury
- high fat diet induced
- induced pluripotent stem cells
- wild type