Observing painful events in others leads to a temporally extended general response facilitation in the self

Excitability in the motor cortex is modulated when we observe other people receiving a painful stimulus (Avenanti et al., Nat Neurosci 8(7):955–960, 2005). However, the task dependency of this modulation is not well understood, as different paradigms have yielded seemingly different results. Previous neurophysiological work employing transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) suggests that watching another person’s hand being pierced by a needle …