When watching others in pain, women ’s brains show more empathy

It ’s a phrase many of us have uttered at one time or other: “I feel your pain.”However, the degree to which you actually feel another person ’s pain may depend on your sex. That was a key finding of a recent study by Leonardo Christov-Moore, a UCLA postdoctoral fellow in psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences, and Dr. Marco Iacoboni, director of the Neuromodulation Lab at theUCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, who studied the brain activity of people as they reacted to images of pain in others.Christov-Moore and Iacoboni, whoseresearch was published in the journal Brain Structure and Function, discuss their study ’s findings and implications.UCLA HealthMarco IacoboniWhy did you decide to study this issue?Iacoboni:  Wepublished a paper some years ago reviewing all of the scientific evidence on sex differences in empathy, even going into the animal kingdom, and it was a natural follow-up to that study. In reviewing the literature, one thing that was really lacking was a large study using brain imaging to look at empathy.How was the study set up?Christov-Moore: Participants lied down in the MRI scanner and viewed a video clip of a human hand, which was either being poked with a syringe or, as a control condition, with a soft cotton swab.  The purpose was to get people’s immediate reflexive responses — neural responses — to the sight of someone else in pain.You used a technology known as a functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. How did that wor...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news