Rune Bruls

Representational geometry of emotional empathy in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and in the mid-posterior insula.

The paper investigates how brain regions encode emotional facial expressions using representational similarity analysis, finding that vmPFC and mid-posterior insula encode emotion categories and arousal+valence better than arousal alone.

Intracranial human recordings reveal intensity coding for the pain of others in the insula

The paper uses intracranial recordings to show that the insula encodes pain intensity from different stimuli with distinct spatial and temporal coding patterns.

Cingulate dependent social risk assessment in rats

This study shows that rats exhibit bidirectional distress transmission regardless of familiarity, with cingulate-dependent mechanisms influencing both observer and demonstrator behavior.