When watching others in pain, women’s brains show more empathy

It’s a phrase many of us have uttered at one time or other: “I feel your pain.”

However, the degree to which you actually feel another person’s pain may depend on your sex. That was a key finding of a recent study by Leonardo Christov-Moore, a UCLA postdoctoral fellow in psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences, and Dr. Marco Iacoboni, director of the Neuromodulation Lab at the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, who studied the brain activity of people as they reacted to images of pain in others.

Christov-Moore and Iacoboni, whose research was published in the journal Brain Structure and Function, discuss their study’s findings and implications.

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