How are other people doing – and what does that mean for me?

In everyday life, we often observe how other people are coping with an illness, how they are benefiting from treatment, or whether they are struggling with side effects. These social experiences lead us to develop our own expectations about how we might fare in the same situation – and this can in turn influence the course of our own illness or therapy. For example, positive expectations about a particular treatment increase the likelihood that it will be successful, and if we are afraid of side effects, there’s a greater risk that we will actually experience them.

We often merely suspect how other people are feeling – but we react anyway

Our observations of other people's symptoms are rarely unambiguous, especially when we’re trying to draw conclusions about somebody’s internal experience based on our external observations. As a good example of this, people with breathing problems often show very different external reactions, so we can only guess about how severe the breathing problems actually are and how, exactly, they feel. Despite this, people are more likely to experience shortness of breath, and to a greater extent, if they have seen other people experiencing it.

How does the social transmission of disease symptoms work?

In the new Project A18 of our CRC/TRR 289, we are investigating how the social transmission of negative symptoms works. How do people react when they observe very different degrees of breathing problems in others? And how do they react to their own breathing problems following different social observations of others? We are investigating these questions in experiments with healthy volunteers.

What role does the body’s own opioid system play?

In Project A18, we are also investigating the neuronal processes underlying the processing of the social observation of breathing problems. Specifically, we are using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate which areas of the brain are involved and how, as well as what role the body’s own opioid system plays in this regard. Together with the results from other projects, these findings should ultimately provide us with information about whether people generalize the expectations they have developed from social observations to other unpleasant experiences: Do people perceive their own pain differently if they have previously observed other people in respiratory distress? Do people react differently to positive experiences such as reassuring touch? Answering these questions might be hugely beneficial for everyday medical routine by supporting long-term well-being and people’s ability to tolerate treatments.