Altered Neural Pain Empathic Reactivity in NSSI Adolescents

Nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) is defined as direct, deliberate bodily harm without suicidal intention. In recent years, growing evidence suggests that NSSI has become a worldwide public health issue. People with NSSI behaviors, especially adolescents, commonly exhibit emotion-related and interpersonal problems. Pain empathy represents an essential basal domain of socio-emotional processing and refers to the ability to empathize, connect and share with others' pain. However, altered empathic processing has not been systematically examined in adolescents with NSSI. To this end, the current functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study will recruit one group of NSSI adolescents (n=40) and one healthy control (HC) group (n=40), to compare their neural activity regarding pain empathy processing, which is measured by blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI. The investigators included conditions of physical pain empathy (stimuli depicting noxious stimulation to the limbs) and affective pain empathy (stimuli depicting faces expressing pain) as well as corresponding control stimuli. The investigators hypothesize that compared to HC, NSSI adolescents show increased empathic reactivity to physical pain stimuli in salience and arousal related brain regions but decreased empathic reactivity to affective pain empathic stimuli.