Figure 1

Stimuli and rating questions of the three experiments. In all three experiments, patients were required to view stimulus pictures and respond to a subsequent rating question. The upper row shows two example stimuli of the physical pain (PP) experiment, reflecting the two stimulus categories used in the experiment, and the respective rating question. Example stimuli and rating questions for the basic emotions (EMO) and social pain (SP) experiments are displayed in the middle and lower row. Stimuli for the basic emotions experiment were taken from the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces database⁶⁹, which is publicly available and may be used for non-commercial scientific research purposes (https://www.kdef.se/; stimuli shown here: BF02HAS, BF02NES, BF02SAS). In the physical pain and basic emotions experiment, patients were instructed to look at the photograph for 4.5 s and to rate the intensity of pain or the quality of emotion that the depicted person would experience. In the social pain experiment, sketches showed a protagonist, indicated by a red arrow above their head, in potentially embarrassing (socially painful) or neutral situations. Each sketch was accompanied by a sentence introducing the current scenario [for these specific situations: “You are on the pavement: a car driver knocks over a trash can while backing into a parking space.” (Pain); “You are in the city: a cyclist turns right.” (Neutral)]. Patients were instructed to look at each sketch for 12 s and to subsequently rate the intensity of the embarrassment the protagonist would feel in the respective scenario. The length of the rating phase was 3 s in all experiments.