Neural correlates of feeling sympathy

Abstract

Positron emission tomography (PET) was used to investigate the neural correlates of feeling sympathy for someone else (i.e. the affinity, association, or relationship between persons wherein whatever affects one similarly affects the other). While undergoing PET scans, subjects were presented with a series of video-clips showing individuals (who were semi-professional stage actors) telling sad and neutral stories, as if they had personally experienced them. These stories were told with either congruent or incongruent motor expression of emotion (MEE). At the end of each movie, subjects were asked to rate the mood of the communicator and also how likable they found that person. Watching sad stories versus neutral stories was associated with increased activity in emotion processing-related structures, as well as in a set of cortical areas that belong to a "shared representation" network, including the right inferior parietal cortex. Motor expression of emotion, regardless of the narrative content of the stories, resulted in a specific regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) increase in the left inferior frontal gyrus. The condition of mismatch between the narrative content of the stories and the motor expression of emotion elicited a significant skin conductance response and strong rCBF increase in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and superior frontal gyrus which are involved in dealing with social conflict. Taken together, these results are consistent with a model of feeling sympathy that relies on both the shared representation and the affective networks. Interestingly, this network was not activated when subjects watched inappropriate social behavior.

A perception-action model for empathy

“…For example, the activation in this study was in pre-SMA and previous research found anterior SMA activity to be associated with grasp observation and imitation and posterior SMA activity with grasp performance (Grafton et al, 1996a). Tasks where the subject must take the perspective of the object have found consistent engagement of right inferior parietal (thought to suppress the subject's own perspective) and medial prefrontal and frontal pole (thought to inhibit the subject's self-processes) (Decety & Chaminade, 2003;Decety et al, 2002;Ruby & Decety, 2001). In a task where objects directed their emotion toward the subject (as opposed to away from the subject), the anterior portion of the superior temporal lobe was selectively activated (Wicker et al, 2003b).…”

“…In this cognitive form of empathy, subjects could take the spatial perspective of the object (as proposed by perspective-taking models of empathy, e.g. Decety & Chaminade, 2003), but more often subjects probably just imagine themselves to be the object. In this process, the orbitofrontal cortex is needed as a 'convergence/divergence zone', to link the constructed feeling state of the object with an appropriate response (Bechara et al, 2000).…”

“…Tasks where the subjects must observe the emotional state of the object such as pictures of basic emotions (Carr et al, 2003), videos of actors telling sad stories (Decety & Chaminade, 2003), visual cues that a loved one is in pain (Singer et al, 2004), videos of objects displaying disgust (Wicker et al, 2003a) and pictures of an object's bodily state of fear (de Gelder et al, 2004) engage areas known to be related to the representation of one's own feeling state such as the anterior insula and cingulate cortex. Supporting the PAM, experiencing pain and being cued that another is experiencing pain both activate the anterior insula, rostral anterior cingulate, brainstem and cerebellum, and the activation in the insula and cingulate correlates with trait empathy.…”

Coupled neural systems underlie the production and comprehension of naturalistic narrative speech

“…However, the left IFG was also found to be involved with semantic, syntactic, and phonological processes that are relevant to both the production and comprehension of speech (41). These processes include semantic retrieval (60), lexical decision (61), syntactic transformations (62,63), and verbal working memory (64)(65)(66)(67)(68)(69). Based on such reports it was argued that the left IFG is involved with both production and comprehension processes (21,70,71).…”

Language in shadow

“…However, the existence of areas exclusively devoted to language has increasingly been challenged by experimental evidence showing that Broca's area and its homologue in the right hemisphere also become active during the observation of hand/mouth actions performed by other individuals (Aziz-Zadeh, Koski, Zaidel, Mazziotta, & Iacoboni, 2006;Decety et al, 1997;Decety & Chaminade, 2003;Grafton, Arbib, Fadiga, & Rizzolatti, 1996;Grè zes, Costes, & Decety, 1998;Grè zes, Armony, Rowe, & Passingham, 2003;Iacoboni, Woods, Brass, Bekkering, Mazziotta, & Rizzolatti, 1999;. This finding seems to favor the evolutionary hypothesis, supporting the idea that the linguistic processing that characterizes Broca's area may be closely related to gesture processing.…”