Posted by 
According to neuroscience, human brains activate tactile and emotional regions when they see people in pain. A study from Selene Gallo (Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, KNAW) investigated whether altering activity in these tactile brain regions while witnessing the pain of others would alter people’s willingness to help.
Rsearchers from the Social Brain Lab, led by Valeria Gazzola and Christian Keysers (Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, KNAW), gave participants the opportunity to reduce the pain of a victim they could reduce the pain by giving up money they could have use while their tactile brain activity was measured and altered.
The researchers used electroencephalography, a method to record electrical activity of the brain, in healthy human participants. With this method, they found that the activity in tactile cortices increased when participants increased their donation. Later they altered brain activity by using neuromodulation.
Normally participants gave more money when the victim experienced more pain. But when interfering with tactile activity two related phenomena were observed: people became less able to perceive in how much pain the other person was and they no longer adapted their donations as appropriately to the needs of the other.
An important social function for the tactile corticosteroids, the results suggest that human tactile cortices, primarily evolved to perceive touch and pain on the body. they contribute to prosocial decision-making by helping to transform the sight of bodily harm into an accurate feeling for how much pain the victim experiences. This feeling is necessary to adapt human helping needs of others.
Providing a link between empathy for pain and prosocial behavior at the neural level is crucial to understand human social human nature and target pharmacological approaches to treat pathologies in which these mechanisms dysfunction, for example in psychopath individual.
haleplushearty.org