User:Mikesettepani/Pain empathy/Jeffbass75 Peer Review

General info

 * Whose work are you reviewing?

Mikesettepani


 * Link to draft you're reviewing
 * Pain empathy


 * Link to the current version of the article (if it exists)
 * Pain empathy

Evaluation
Evolutionary implications of pain empathy are a nice inclusion, as it shows that this is an innate behavior with biomarkers rather than an acquired behavior. As described it is important to understand that humans have evolved and learned through trial and error, and this mechanism was likely developed as a means of assessing when errors are made in the simplest of ways which is through pain.

The neuroscience of pain empathy section regarding self-other discrimination is another section that is notable, as an overidentification with painful experiences of others could be overwhelming as they would become as cognitively debilitated as the victim. This section also does a good job of continuing what the article started to say about how pain empathy is used as a form of communication, again as a likely evolutionary adaptation.

Tests for the presence of pain empathy are covered well but I think that the assumption that couples would have empathy for each other may be overrepresentative. Pain empathy would likely be higher if you have a personal connection to the victim, even though pain empathy is still felt to a certain extent seeing strangers get hurt. Differentiating observed pain to firsthand pain is important, as it does make it evident that pain empathy levels may not always be proportionate to pain levels felt by the victim.

The conflicting points are a nice inclusion, as it acknowledges that extraneous factors may be explaining the pain matrix-pain empathy relation. I do feel though that it could be expanded by discussing how variation might occur between people as they are genetically different. It may be possible that the specific parts of the pain matrix activated by pain empathy may be different, or activate in different quantities between people.

For the section covering detection, EEG was shown to be an important way of finding this information, but a problem with EEG is that it answers more of the "when" question of certain activity as opposed to the "where". This is problematic as since there does not appear to be a uniform localization of pain empathy pertaining to the pain matrix being able to find specific alternate locations would prove difficult with this method.

Mental health is covered extensively, and I feel that this should be the case given that empathy is an emotion and is subject to be affected by emotional disorders. I do think that the Autism section could be expanded upon, as it is the only section to not have electrophysiological data to back up its claims from what was reported. Covering sadism is important as well, as it almost appears like pain empathy in reverse, as pleasure is felt as opposed to pain or indifference. One limitation I do feel is present in this section is that there really is no distinction made between affective and cognitive empathy relating to pain empathy, as these domains would be affected differently based on mental health diagnosis.

The bias section covers well something I brought up earlier in that pain empathy is proportionate to how the observer views their victim. It also covers an inherent empathy gap in humans, as I could imagine that it would be quite difficult to accurately feel a quantity of pain empathy that is similar to the pain experienced without having actually having felt that painful experience before. Empathy fatigue is something that could be covered in the physician section, as it mostly talks about how automatic empathic responses are downregulated, when it may also affect voluntary empathic responses as well.