You through me How the pain of others influences our choices

We often find ourselves in situations where we have to weigh our personal interests against the well-being of others. This dissertation focuses on how individuals make morally challenging decisions that impact both themselves and others. The studies presented utilize real-life interaction naturalistic paradigms with neuroimaging techniques as fMRI and EEG to investigate the neural mechanisms at play, with a focus on the vicarious pain network. In another study the role of insula, a key pain processing area, in explored using iEEG and fMRI. Results indicate that the vicarious pain network scales with how much people help and that somatically feeling someone else's pain increases prosociality. In a moral conflict learning paradigm, even people who decided to benefit themselves still represented the others' pain in their brain and vmPFC was involved when preferences were taken into account. Exploring the connection between empathy for pain and hierarchy revealed that obeying orders reduces the vicarious pain network activity and that neither those directly delivering pain to a victim nor those who give the orders for the harm feel responsible for their actions and its consequences as agency, responsibility and empathy are split across multiple individuals. Examining pain encoding at the insula revealed regions that encode intensity separately for faces and body parts in pain, the existence of neurons whose spiking activity correlates with perceived intensity and correlations between broadband activity and subjectively perceived pain intensity. Overall the thesis provides new insights into the neural mechanisms of moral decision making and pain perception.