Neural responses to perceiving suffering in humans and animals

Abstract

The human ability to perceive and understand others' suffering is critical to reinforcing and maintaining our social bonds. What is not clear, however, is the extent to which this generalizes to nonhuman entities. Anecdotal evidence indicates that people may engage in empathy-like processes when observing suffering nonhuman entities, but psychological research suggests that we more readily empathize with those to whom we are closer and more similar. In this research, we examined neural responses in participants while they were presented with pictures of human versus dog suffering. We found that viewing human and animal suffering led to large overlapping regions of activation previously implicated in empathic responding to suffering, including the anterior cingulate gyrus and anterior insula. Direct comparisons of viewing human and animal suffering also revealed differences such that human suffering yielded significantly greater medial prefrontal activation, consistent with high-level theory of mind, whereas animal suffering yielded significantly greater parietal and inferior frontal activation, consistent with more semantic evaluation and perceptual simulation.

Keywords:

• Empathy
• Emotion
• Mentalizing
• Anthropomorphism

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a Social Science Research Institute grant, Penn State University, to R. B. A., Jr. We acknowledge Amanda Gearhart and David Pennell for their help with data collection and Jasmine Boshyan for her helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

¹ We included same-race and other-race individuals here in order to examine if any human-specific empathy responses generalized to other-race individuals. Research examining infrahumanization indicates that humans may not attribute human-like emotional states to outgroup individuals (e.g., Leyens et al., 2000), thus suggesting that empathy for outgroup suffering may be more comparable to empathy for nonhuman entities.

² In addition to the analysis reported here, we compared neural responses for perceiving suffering in White individuals versus dogs and Black individuals versus dogs. In these analyses, we found the same results as reported here, with activations in all the same areas reported at the threshold we use for this analysis.

³ See note 1.