Anterior Insula Regulation and Pain Empathy

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China37 enrolled

Overview

The aim is to test whether rtfMRI-based neurofeedback training on anterior insula impacts pain empathy.

In the present study, investigators plan to use the real-time fMRI neurofeedback to train healthy subjects to learn volitional control over their own anterior insula (AI) activity. Then the effect of AI regulation will assessed by examining subjects' empathic responses and functional connectivity changes. Subjects were separated into two groups randomly. While the experimental group received specific neurofeedback from their own AI, the control group received sham NF from an unspecific region.

Study Type

INTERVENTIONAL

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

BASIC_SCIENCE

Masking

SINGLE

Enrollment

Conditions

Anterior Insula Activity During Regulation Empathic Responses After Anterior Insula Regulation

Interventions

real-time fMRI neurofeedback training running on Turbo Brain voyager (TBV) 3.2 (Brain Innovation, Maastricht, The Netherlands)DEVICE

Eligibility

Sex: ALLMin age: 18 YearsMax age: 30 YearsHealthy volunteers:

Medical Language ↔ Plain English

Inclusion Criteria: * Healthy subjects without past or current psychiatric or neurological disorders Exclusion Criteria: * history of head injury; * claustrophobia; * pregnancy; * medical or psychiatric illness.

Outcomes

Primary Outcomes

Neural Activity of Anterior Insula During Neorofeedback Training

Neural activity was analyzed using standard fMRI analysis procedure that examine neural activity during training of anterior insula regulation. The measures include BOLD signal analysis (reflecting neural activity strengths) as well as functional connectivity analysis (that examine the interaction between different brain regions).

Time frame: three days.

Pain Empathy Rating Scores

Subjects were required to rate their empathic feeling towards painful pictures on a Likert Scale ranging from 1-9 (1 = not at all and 9 = very painful). The effects of training on the empathy for pain were analyzed comparing the feedback group with the controls group. For each subject differences were calculated between pictures that were preceded by a training compared to a no-training block. Within the context of the present design we expected that training-induced increases in anterior insula activity should lead to higher pain empathy ratings in the training group as compared to the control group.

Time frame: three days.

Data from ClinicalTrials.gov

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