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Pain empathy is a specific variety of empathy that involves recognizing and understanding another person's pain.
Empathy is the mental ability that allows one person to understand another person's mental and emotional state and how to effectively respond to that person. There are several cues that can communicate pain to another person: visualization of the injury-causing event, the injury itself, behavioral efforts of the injured to avoid further harm, and displays of pain and distress such as facial expressions, crying, and screaming. When a person receives cues that another person is in pain, neural pain circuits within the receiver's brain are activated. From an evolutionary perspective, pain empathy is beneficial for human group survival since it provides motivation for non-injured people to offer aid to the injured and to avoid injury themselves.