Hypnotic analgesia reduces brain responses to pain seen in others.

Brain responses to pain experienced by oneself or seen in other people show consistent overlap in the pain processing network, particularly anterior insula, supporting the view that pain empathy partly relies on neural processes engaged by self-nociception. However, it remains unresolved whether changes in one's own pain sensation may affect empathic responding to others' pain. Here we show that inducing analgesia through hypnosis leads to decreased responses to both self and vicarious experience of pain. Activations in the right anterior insula and amygdala were markedly reduced when participants received painful thermal stimuli following hypnotic analgesia on their own hand, but also when they viewed pictures of others' hand in pain. Functional connectivity analysis indicated that this hypnotic modulation of pain responses was associated with differential recruitment of right prefrontal regions implicated in selective attention and inhibitory control. Our results provide novel support to the view that self-nociception is involved during empathy for pain, and demonstrate the possibility to use hypnotic procedures to modulate higher-level emotional and social processes

A Common Anterior Insula Representation of Disgust Observation, Experience and Imagination Shows Divergent Functional Connectivity Pathways

Similar brain regions are involved when we imagine, observe and execute an action. Is the same true for emotions? Here, the same subjects were scanned while they (a) experience, (b) view someone else experiencing and (c) imagine experiencing gustatory emotions (through script-driven imagery). Capitalizing on the fact that disgust is repeatedly inducible within the scanner environment, we scanned the same participants while they (a) view actors taste the content of a cup and look disgusted (b) tasted unpleasant bitter liquids to induce disgust, and (c) read and imagine scenarios involving disgust and their neutral counterparts. To reduce habituation, we inter-mixed trials of positive emotions in all three scanning experiments. We found voxels in the anterior Insula and adjacent frontal operculum to be involved in all three modalities of disgust, suggesting that simulation in the context of social perception and mental imagery of disgust share a common neural substrates. Using effective connectivity, this shared region however was found to be embedded in distinct functional circuits during the three modalities, suggesting why observing, imagining and experiencing an emotion feels so different

Systematic placement of Dasypogonaceae among commelinid monocots: evidence from flowers and fruits

Despite progress in clarifying the relationships of Dasypogonaceae (four genera, Baxteria, Calectasia, Dasypogon, and Kingia), their infrafamilial relationships and precise affinities within the commelinid clade remain unsatisfactorily resolved. This paper reviews existing data on the systematic affinities of Dasypogonaceae. It also presents new data on floral structure in all four genera, and data on floral ontogeny in Dasypogon. In Dasypogon, Kingia, and Baxteria the ovary is trilocular and septal nectaries are present around the ovary base. In Calectasia, the ovary is unilocular and septal nectaries are entirely absent. Two subfamilial groupings within Dasypogonaceae (Calectasia-Dasypogon and Baxteria-Kingia) are proposed on the basis of leaf anatomy and ovule and ovary morphology. Many floral characters are plesiomorphic in Dasypogonaceae, but some morphological characters support a close relationship with the order Poales sensu lato, especially the epidermal location of the silica bodies. The unusual long-stalked "drumstick" inflorescences of Dasypogon and Kingia resemble those of some Poales, in which flowers are frequently borne on condensed inflorescences. A possible close relationship between Dasypogonaceae and some Poales such as Rapateaceae and Thurniaceae merits further exploration. © 2012 The New York Botanical Garden.Paula J. Rudall, John G. Conra

Data from: Structural alterations of the social brain: a comparison between schizophrenia and autism

Autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia share a substantial number of etiologic and phenotypic characteristics. Still, no direct comparison of both disorders has been performed to identify differences and commonalities in brain structure. In this voxel based morphometry study, 34 patients with autism spectrum disorder, 21 patients with schizophrenia and 26 typically developed control subjects were included to identify global and regional brain volume alterations. No global gray matter or white matter differences were found between groups. In regional data, patients with autism spectrum disorder compared to typically developed control subjects showed smaller gray matter volume in the amygdala, insula, and anterior medial prefrontal cortex. Compared to patients with schizophrenia, patients with autism spectrum disorder displayed smaller gray matter volume in the left insula. Disorder specific positive correlations were found between mentalizing ability and left amygdala volume in autism spectrum disorder, and hallucinatory behavior and insula volume in schizophrenia. Results suggest the involvement of social brain areas in both disorders. Further studies are needed to replicate these findings and to quantify the amount of distinct and overlapping neural correlates in autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia