One's Interoception Affects the Representation of Seeing Others' Pain: A Randomized Controlled qEEG Study.
Michela BalconiLaura AngiolettiPublished in: Pain research & management (2021)
The results suggest that IA might enhance the emotional representation of painful stimuli, highlighting their negative and unpleasant features in the EXP group, while the attention of the CTR group was mainly drawn to nonpainful stimuli in social and individual conditions, with a positive valence. The role of frontal regions in the processing of social stimuli through social cognition, inducing emotional mirroring and requiring deeper analysis of the social context, was underlined. We propose that IA could be trained for promoting emotion regulation and empathic response.