Publications

Assessing others’ pain relies heavily on facial expressions, yet how individuals translate observable facial features into pain …

Background. Nurse-initiated pain protocols (NIPPs) at emergency department (ED) triage remain underused. This study investigated …

Introduction. Face processing deficits have mostly been documented in single cases/small samples, and rarely following brain tumours. …

Inferring another person’s pain is a challenging computational problem. Unlike self-related pain, individuals have no access to others’ …

After brain damage, patients can experience the lack of ownership of body parts. By exploiting a large dataset and state-of-the-art analyses, Cataldo et al. demonstrate that subtle forms of disownership are undetected post-stroke, and suggest the role of complex bilateral brain networks in the construction of body awareness in humans

We appraise other people’s emotions by combining multiple sources of information, including somatic facial/body reactions and the …

In the early days of the Covid19 pandemic, individuals were asked to perform costly actions to reduce harm to strangers, even while the …

Recent research has explored the effectiveness of interactive virtual experiences in managing pain and anxiety in children during …

The COVID-19 pandemic had a profound negative impact on the psychological wellbeing of healthcare providers (HPs), but little is known …

Our emotions may influence how we interact with others. Previous studies have shown an important role of emotion induction in …

Medical students and professional healthcare providers often underestimate patients’ pain, together with decreased neural responses to …

Theoretical accounts of pain and empirical evidence indicate that pain and cognitive control share common neurocognitive processes. …

Evaluating correctly others’ pain is a crucial prosocial ability, especially relevant for the healthcare system. In clinical …

Previous studies found that distracting someone through a challenging activity leads to hypoalgesia, an effect mediated by parietal and …

In the last two years, governments of many countries imposed heavy social restrictions to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus, …

Vocal emotion recognition, a key determinant to analyzing a speaker’s emotional state, is known to be impaired following cerebellar …

Pain inadequate treatment is frequent in modern society, with major medical, ethical, and financial implications. In many healthcare …

Estimating others’ pain is a challenging inferential process, associated with a high degree of uncertainty. The present study …

Extensive neuroimaging literature suggests that understanding others’ thoughts and emotions engages a wide network encompassing …

Healthcare providers often underestimate patients’ pain, sometimes even when aware of their reports. This could be the effect of …

Embodied models of social cognition argue that others’ emotional states are processed by re-enacting a representation of the same …

Neuroimaging studies suggest that understanding emotions in others engages brain regions partially common to those associated with more …

Embodied models suggest that moral judgments are strongly intertwined with first-hand somatic experiences, with some pointing to …

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by maladaptive social functioning, and widespread negativity biases. The neural …

Expectations affect the subjective experience of pain by increasing sensitivity to noxious events, an effect underlain by brain regions …

Pain undertreatment, or oligoanalgesia, is frequent in the emergency department (ED), with major medical, ethical, and financial …

Embodied models of social cognition argue that others’ affective states are processed by re-enacting a sensory-specific representation …

Seminal theories posit that social and physical suffering underlie partly-common representational code. It is unclear, however, if this …

Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) often engage in dangerous self-injurious behaviors (SIBs) as a maladaptive …

Expectations modulate the subjective experience of pain by increasing sensitivity to nociceptive inputs, an effect mediated by brain …

People’s sensitivity to first-hand pain is affected by their ongoing emotions, with positive states (joy, amusement) exerting …

The superior temporal sulcus (STS) is a major component of the human face perception network, implicated in processing dynamic …

Attention and perception are potentiated for emotionally significant stimuli, promoting efficient reactivity and survival. But does …

In the last decade, a growing research effort in behavioral sciences, especially psychology and neuroscience, has been invested in the …

The anterior insula (AI) and mid-anterior cingulate cortex (mACC) have repeatedly been implicated in first-hand and vicarious …

Pain sensitivity increases when a noxious stimulus is preceded by cues predicting higher intensity. However, it is unclear whether the …

The ability to select, within the complexity of sensory input, the information most relevant for our purposes is influenced by both …

Forming and updating impressions about others is critical in everyday life and engages portions of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex …

Despite an overall consensus that Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) entails atypical processing of human faces and emotional expressions, …

Understanding emotions in others engages specific brain regions in temporal and medial prefrontal cortices. These activations are often …

Whether motor and linguistic representations of actions share common neural structures has recently been the focus of an animated …

Rejections of unfair offers in the ultimatum game (UG) are commonly assumed to reflect negative emotional arousal mediated by the …

A crucial feature of socially adaptive behavior is the ability to recognize when our actions harm other individuals. Previous research …

Structural and functional studies have shown that schizophrenia is often associated with frontolimbic abnormalities in the prefrontal …

Human ability to imitate movements is instantiated in parietal, premotor and opercular structures, often referred to as the human …

Embodied theories hold that understanding what another person is doing requires the observer to map that action directly onto his or …

The discovery of regions in the human brain (e.g., insula and cingulate cortex) that activate both under direct exposure to pain and …

Neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies suggest distinct body representations involved in coding one’s and others’ body. …

Traditionally the motor system was thought of as a movement output device that, after brain damage, can impede patients from correctly …

The “irrational” rejections of unfair offers by people playing the Ultimatum Game (UG), a widely used laboratory model of economical …

Neuropsychological studies suggest that the human brain is endowed with two body representations: the body schema (BS), coding the …

An experiment was conducted to contrast the motor performance of three groups (N = 20) of participants: (1) patients with confirmed …

Cognitive neuroscientists have contributed to the understanding of imitation according to their expertise. Neuropsychologists first …

Classical economical theory sees rejections of unfair offers by people playing the Ultimatum Game (UG) as “irrational”. Recent studies …

Neuropsychological studies suggest that patients with left parietal lesions may show impaired localization of parts of either their own …

When looking to our reflection, or moving a video-game character, we see our own movement preformed by an agent which is physically …