Empathic Care and Distress: Predictive Brain Markers and Dissociable Brain Systems

Ashar, Yoni K.; Andrews‐Hanna, Jessica R.; Dimidjian, Sona; Wager, Tor D.

doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2017.05.014

Cited by 155 publications

(144 citation statements)

References 94 publications

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“…Selfreported care for others predicts greater SA and VS activity to listening to biographies of others in need and VS activity from this analysis predicts greater charitable giving outside of the scanner. 85 Likewise, SA activity to emotionally evocative social images is associated with greater daily giving support behavior outside of the scanner. 86 Though not specifically about giving support behavior, higher prosocial sentiments (defined as acting in accordance with one's own values toward one's best friend) are associated with increased activity in the SA in response to a social emotions task, 87 whereas neurodegeneration to the SA is associated with lower scores on a prosocial task.…”

Section: Parental Care Neural Regions and Giving Supportmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural mechanisms of the link between giving social support and health

Inagaki

2018

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

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Giving social support to others has emerged as an additional route by which social ties influence health. Thus, giving support to others not only influences the health of the individual receiving support, but also the health of the individual giving the support. However, the neural mechanisms by which giving support leads to health are only beginning to be explored. In hopes of consolidating and guiding future research on giving support and health, the current review considers why, how, and when giving support is health promoting. Special emphasis is placed on neural regions known to contribute to parental care in animals that both reinforce giving support behavior (ventral striatum and septal area) and reduce stress-related responding (e.g., amygdala) to facilitate care. Hypothesized links between neural regions involved in giving support and peripheral physiology (sympathetic nervous system, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, and related inflammatory responding) are considered as well as the conditions under which giving support should be most beneficial for health. Finally, the implications of the current perspective for understanding how social relationships, more broadly, contribute to health and suggestions for future directions are offered.

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Section: Parental Care Neural Regions and Giving Supportmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural mechanisms of the link between giving social support and health

Inagaki

2018

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

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“…We used a machine learning approach [10][11][12] to train multivoxel brain decoders to predict either objective physiological reactivity or subjective fear reports. To do so, we leveraged whole-brain data in order to determine the patterns of voxel activities that are the most predictive of each outcome (i.e., levels of fear and levels of skin conductance reactivity).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Multivoxel Pattern Analysis Reveals Dissociations Between Subjective Fear and Its Physiological Correlates

Taschereau-Dumouchel

Kawato

Lau

2019

Preprint

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I n studies of anxiety and other affective disorders, objectively measured physiological responses have commonly been used as a proxy for measuring subjective experiences associated with pathology. However, this commonly adopted 'biosignal' approach has recently been called into question on the grounds that subjective experiences and objective physiological responses may dissociate. We performed machine-learning based analysis on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data to assess this issue in the case of fear. Participants were presented with pictures of commonly feared animals in an fMRI experiment. Multivoxel brain activity decoders were trained to predict participants' subjective fear ratings and their skin conductance reactivity, respectively. While subjective fear and objective physiological responses were correlated in general, the respective whole-brain multivoxel decoders for the two measures were not identical. Some key brain regions such as the amygdala and insula appear to be primarily involved in the prediction of physiological reactivity, while some regions previously associated with metacognition and conscious perception, including some areas in the prefrontal cortex, appear to be primarily predictive of the subjective experience of fear. The present findings are in support of the recent call for caution in assuming a one-to-one mapping between subjective sufferings and their putative biosignals, despite the clear advantages in the latter's being objectively and continuously measurable in physiological terms.

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“…Translational studies have not yet assessed the role of insula in responding to affective social stimuli and the evidence in support of insula in social cognition from neuroimaging and patient-based studies do not yet demonstrate the necessity of the insula 19,20 .…”

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confidence: 99%

Insular Cortex Mediates Approach and Avoidance Responses to Social Affective Stimuli

Rogers

Varela

Gribbons

et al. 2017

Preprint

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Social animals detect the affective states of others and utilize this information to orchestrate appropriate social interactions. Social affective behaviors include cooperation, reproductive acts and avoiding sick individuals. In a social affective behavioral test in which experimental adult male rats were given the choice to interact with either naive or stressed conspecifics, the experimental rats demonstrated both approach and avoidant behaviors towards the conspecific, depending upon the age of the conspecific; experimental adult rats approached the stressed juvenile but avoided the stressed adult. Optogenetic inhibition of the insular cortex, a region anatomically positioned to contribute to social cognition, disrupted these behaviors. Receptors for the social nonapeptide oxytocin (OT) are found in high density within the insular cortex and here oxytocin increased intrinsic excitability and synaptic efficacy in acute insular cortex slices. Blockade of oxytocin receptors (OTRs) in the insula eliminated the effect of conspecific stress on approach behavior, while insular administration of OT recapitulated the behaviors typically observed in response to stressed conspecifics. Network analysis using Fos immunoreactivity identified functional connectivity between the insular cortex and the network of regions involved in social decision making. These results implicate insular cortex as a novel target of OT and suggest that insula is a key component in the circuit underlying age-dependent social responses to stressed conspecifics.Social animals, including humans, have an enormous repertoire of behavioral expressions that provide for the transmission of one's affective state to other members of the group 1-3 . Sensory and perceptive systems in the "social decision-making network" (SDMN) which consists of the social brain network 4 and the mesolimbic reward system 5 allow one to appraise these social stimuli and integrate them with past experiences, situational, and somatic factors to shape specific behavioral responses 6 . In addition to the SDMN, growing evidence implicates insular cortex in responding to socioemotional stimuli in humans. When tasked to identify the emotion of another from a facial expression, or to observe another suffer a painful stimulation, a reliable neural correlate is relative increase in the blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal in the insular cortex 7,8 . Accordingly, emotion recognition and empathic deficits have been reported among individuals with insular cortex lesions [9][10][11][12] . Empathic processes are also disrupted in autism spectrum 1 Department of Psychology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA 2 These authors made equal contributions to this work. *Corresponding Author: John P. Christianson, Department of Psychology, Boston College, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 USA, Email: j.christianson@bc.edu, Phone: +1-617-552-3970.A note about the preprint. This manuscript was submitted to bioRxiv.org after multiple rounds of peer review. The manuscrip...

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Empathic Care and Distress: Predictive Brain Markers and Dissociable Brain Systems

Cited by 155 publications

References 94 publications

Neural mechanisms of the link between giving social support and health

Neural mechanisms of the link between giving social support and health

Multivoxel Pattern Analysis Reveals Dissociations Between Subjective Fear and Its Physiological Correlates

Insular Cortex Mediates Approach and Avoidance Responses to Social Affective Stimuli

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