Ever literally¹ felt somebody else's pain? You're not alone, with new research showing some people do have a physical reaction to others' injuries.

你曾经“切身”感受到别人的痛苦是吗？不止你一人这样，一项最新研究表明，有些人对他人的伤痛确实会产生生理反应。

In a recent study, a third of subjects claimed to feel real pain in the same part of the body as the victim they were watching.

British researchers used brain-imaging technology to show that people who say they feel the pain of others have heightened activity in pain-sensing brain regions when they see someone else being hurt.

For the study, the researchers exposed 108 college students to images of painful situations, ranging from athletes运动员 suffering sports injuries and patients receiving an injection注射.

Nearly a third said that, for at least one image, they not only had an emotional reaction, but also fleetingly² felt pain in the same site as the injury in the image.

The researchers found that while viewing the painful images, both people who said they felt pain and those who did not showed activity in the emotional centers of the brain.

But those who said they felt pain showed greater activity in pain-related brain regions compared with the others, and as compared with their own brain responses to the emotional images.

"Patients with functional³ pain experience pain in the absence of缺乏，不存在 an obvious disease or injury to explain their pain," Dr. Stuart Derbyshire of the University of Birmingham, one of the researchers, told reporters.

"We think this confirms that at least some people have an actual physical reaction when observing others being injured or expressing pain," Derbyshire said.

He noted⁴ that the people who reported feeling pain also tended to say that they avoided horror movies恐怖片 and disturbing烦扰的，令人不安的 images on the news "so as to avoid being in pain".

The findings were published in the December issue of the journal Pain.