Performance monitoring and empathy during active and observational learning in patients with major depression

Thoma, Patrizia; Norra, Christine; Juckel, Georg; Suchan, Boris; Bellebaum, Christian

doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2015.06.002

Cited by 23 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 85 publications

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“…Interestingly, this region is also involved in processing socially relevant emotions (such as arrogance or guilt) beyond basic emotions (Jankowski & Takahashi, 2014;see also D'Agata et al, 2011). Accordingly, alterations in the functioning or structural abnormalities of the medial prefrontal cortices have been associated with abnormal biases in social evaluation that characterize psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia (Brüne, 2005;Pia & Tamietto, 2006;Yamada et al, 2007) or depression (Foland-Ross et al, 2014;Holmes et al, 2012;Thoma, Norra, Juckel, Suchan, & Bellebaum, 2015). Moreover, the mPFC seems to be particularly sensitive to violations of expectations in updating social impressions: For instance, when presented with consistent (either morally good or morally bad) or inconsistent behaviors of an agent, dorsal sectors of the mPFC (dmPFC) preferentially activate when evaluating behaviors that contradict the initially formed impression about the agent (Ma et al, 2012;Mende-Siedlecki et al, 2012).…”

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confidence: 99%

Interfering with activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex via TMS affects social impressions updating

Ferrari

Vecchi

Todorov

et al. 2016

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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In our everyday social interactions we often need to deal with others' unpredictable behaviors. Integrating unexpected information in a consistent representation of another agent is a cognitively demanding process. Several neuroimaging studies point to the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) as a critical structure in mediating social evaluations. Our aim here was to shed light on the possible causal role of the mPFC in the dynamic process of forming and updating social impressions about others. We addressed this issue by suppressing activity in the mPFC by means of 1 Hz offline transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) prior to a task requiring participants to evaluate other agents' trustworthiness after reading about their social behavior. In two different experiments, we found that inhibiting activity in the mPFC increased perceived trustworthiness when inconsistent information about one agent's behavior was provided. In turn, when only negative or positive behaviors of a person were described, TMS over the mPFC did not affect judgments. Our results indicate that the mPFC is causally involved in mediating social impressions updating-at least in cases in which judgment is uncertain due to conflicting information to be processed.

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confidence: 99%

Interfering with activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex via TMS affects social impressions updating

Ferrari

Vecchi

Todorov

et al. 2016

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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“…A growing body of research has used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine dyadic interactions in laboratory-based tasks in which participants watch others receive positive or negative feedback (Thoma et al , 2015). This research builds on previous findings looking at a participant’s ERP response to their gains (the Reward Positivity, or RewP) and losses (the feedback negativity or FN) in a laboratory guessing task, as well as the relative difference between the two.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…firm but fair) parenting would be associated with an enhanced observational ΔRewP. Furthermore, we conducted additional analyses adjusting for participants’ sex, psychopathology history and parents’ ERPs to own outcomes, all of which may influence parents’ observational ERPs (Hajcak et al , 2006; Fukushima and Hiraki, 2009; Gu et al , 2010; Marco-Pallarés et al , 2010; Foti et al , 2011a; Bress et al , 2012, 2013; Thoma et al , 2015). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Authoritarian parenting predicts reduced electrocortical response to observed adolescent offspring rewards

Levinson

Speed

Nelson

et al. 2016

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

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Parenting styles are robust predictors of offspring outcomes, yet little is known about their neural underpinnings. In this study, 44 parent-adolescent dyads (Mage of adolescent = 12.9) completed a laboratory guessing task while EEG was continuously recorded. In the task, each pair member received feedback about their own monetary wins and losses and also observed the monetary wins and losses of the other member of the pair. We examined the association between self-reported parenting style and parents’ electrophysiological responses to watching their adolescent winning and losing money, dubbed the observational Reward Positivity (RewP) and observational feedback negativity (FN), respectively. Self-reported authoritarian parenting predicted reductions in parents’ observational RewP but not FN. This predictive relationship remained after adjusting for sex of both participants, parents’ responsiveness to their own wins, and parental psychopathology. ‘Exploratory analyses found that permissive parenting was associated with a blunting of the adolescents’ response to their parents’ losses’. These findings suggest that parents’ rapid neural responses to their child’s successes may relate to the harsh parenting behaviors associated with authoritarian parenting.

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“…Researchers suggest that the ACC plays a key role in the overlap between cognitive and affective processes (Egner, Etkin, Gale, & Hirsch, ; Ochsner, Hughes, Robertson, Cooper, & Gabrieli, ). For instance, individual differences in empathic abilities are found to associate with variation in the amplitude of the ACC‐related electrophysiological responses, like the error‐related negativity (ERN; Larson, Fair, Good, & Baldwin, ; Santesso & Segalowitz, ) and the feedback‐related negativity (FRN; Bellebaum, Brodmann, & Thoma, ; Thoma, Norra, Juckel, Suchan, & Bellebaum, ).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…The ERN and FRN have been compared with self‐reported empathy measures (Bellebaum et al, ; Larson et al, ; Santesso & Segalowitz, ; Thoma et al, ) and have demonstrated inconsistent findings. Initial findings demonstrated that larger ERN amplitudes were associated with greater empathy scores on the Empathy Quotient (EQ; Baron‐Cohen & Wheelwright, ) in male adolescents (Santesso & Segalowitz, ) These findings were further replicated in both male and female sample groups (Larson et al, ).…”

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confidence: 99%

Error monitoring and empathy: Explorations within a neurophysiological context

et al. 2017

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Past literature has proposed that empathy consists of two components: cognitive and affective empathy. Error monitoring mechanisms indexed by the error-related negativity (ERN) have been associated with empathy. Studies have found that a larger ERN is associated with higher levels of empathy. We aimed to expand upon previous work by investigating how error monitoring relates to the independent theoretical domains of cognitive and affective empathy. Study 1 (N = 24) explored the relationship between error monitoring mechanisms and subcomponents of empathy using the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy and found no relationship. Study 2 (N = 38) explored the relationship between the error monitoring mechanisms and overall empathy. Contrary to past findings, there was no evidence to support a relationship between error monitoring mechanisms and scores on empathy measures. A subsequent meta-analysis (Study 3, N = 125) summarizing the relationship across previously published studies together with the two studies reported in the current paper indicated that overall there was no significant association between ERN and empathy and that there was significant heterogeneity across studies. Future investigations exploring the potential variables that may moderate these relationships are discussed.

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Performance monitoring and empathy during active and observational learning in patients with major depression

Cited by 23 publications

References 85 publications

Interfering with activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex via TMS affects social impressions updating

Interfering with activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex via TMS affects social impressions updating

Authoritarian parenting predicts reduced electrocortical response to observed adolescent offspring rewards

Error monitoring and empathy: Explorations within a neurophysiological context

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