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Comparing cognitive modes underlying pain experience and pain empathy

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 3:00 – 5:00 pm PST, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Amber Lu^1,2 (alu10@student.ubc.ca), Ava Momeni^1,2, Todd Stephen Woodward^1,2; ¹BC Mental Health and Addictions Research Institute, Vancouver, Canada, ²Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia

Introduction: Pain empathy involves witnessing another individual experiencing pain, and involves theory-of-mind processes. This study aimed to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the cognitive modes associated with experiencing pain and employing pain empathy. Methods: An open-source empathic pain task was analyzed, whereby 54 participants were administered pressurized pain on their finger nail, and then watched another individual experience the pain. This was crossed with cues prompting future pain or not. Constrained Principal Component Analysis for fMRI (fMRI-CPCA) was used to extract components from the fMRI data, and task-induced blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signals were analyzed. Results: Response (RESP) mode activation (pain network) and Focus on Visual Features (FVF) deactivation (avoid visual pain stimulus) was strong only when pain stimulation took place, for both experiencing and observing pain. In contrast, the default network (DM) showed a dissociation, activating when observing pain, but deactivating when experiencing pain, strongest when a pain stimulus was actually delivered. Discussion: The findings show a dissociation of cognitive modes, whereby RESP activates when experiencing and observing pain, FVF deactivates under the same conditions, and DM activates while observing others experiencing pain, but deactivates when experiencing pain. This confirms RESP as the pain network, FVF as deactivating when not attending to visual stimuli is beneficial, and DM involvement in engagement of theory-of-mind/mental projection.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Multisensory