The role of anterior insula and anterior cingulate in empathy for pain

Abstract

The understanding of others' feelings and emotional states is commonly defined by the term empathy. Here, I discuss recent findings regarding the differential contribution of anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortices to this function. For the first time, Gu and colleagues (2010) showed no direct involvement of the anterior cingulate during observation of another's pain and proposed the anterior insula as the main neural substrate for the mental representation of empathy.