Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive Functional Dissociation of the Frontoinsular and Anterior Cingulate Cortices in Empathy for Pain

The frontoinsular cortex (FI) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) are thought to be involved in empathy for others ’ pain.However, the functional rolesofFI andACC inempathetic responseshavenot yetbeenclearlydissociated inprevious studies. In this study, participants viewed color photographs depicting humanbody parts in painful or nonpainful situations and performed either pain judgment (painful/ nonpainful) or laterality judgment (left/right) of the body parts. We found that activation of FI, rather than ACC, showed significant increase for painful compared with nonpainful images, regardless of the task requirement. Our data suggest a clear functional dissocia-tion between FI and ACC in which FI is more domain-specific than ACC when processing empathy for pain