The left amygdala: A shared substrate of alexithymia and empathy

Goerlich-Dobre, Katharina Sophia; Lamm, Claus; Pripfl, Juergen; Habel, Ute; Votinov, Mikhail

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.08.014

Cited by 49 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 88 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In particular, the ability to recognize emotions in other persons are essential for understanding their intentions and to adapt own behaviors accordingly. Therefore, the difficulties expressed by alexithymics in this ability may be related to emotional dysfunctions in interpersonal and social relationships, or empathy difficulties (Pouga et al, 2010; Bogdanov et al, 2013; Goerlich-Dobre et al, 2015a). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20; Bagby et al, 1994), which is now widely used, was designed to assess the difficulty to identify or to describe feelings as well as the presence of externally oriented thinking, in line with the very early description of Nemiah and Sifneos (1970). The more recent Bermond-Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire (BVAQ; Vorst and Bermond, 2001) brought psychometric evidence that alexithymia could be constituted by two main psychological dimensions (Goerlich-Dobre et al, 2014, 2015a; Van der Velde et al, 2014; Bermond et al, 2015). One dimension seems to correspond to a cognitive deficit related to the difficulty in identifying, analyzing, and verbalizing feelings whereas the other appears to correspond to an affective deficit based on a poor emotional and imaginative capacity to react to events able to induce emotions and activation (Vorst and Bermond, 2001; Bailey and Henry, 2007; Bermond et al, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Autonomic Reactivity to Arousing Stimuli with Social and Non-social Relevance in Alexithymia

et al. 2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Emotional difficulties in alexithymia and their social consequences have been linked to alterations in autonomic nervous system. However, most of previous studies did not take into account the distinction between the affective and the cognitive dimensions of the alexithymia, leading to inconsistent results.Aim: In this study, we compared the effects of both dimensions of alexithymia on the autonomic arousal to emotional and social visual stimulations.Methods: Skin conductance responses (SCRs) to items of the International Affective Pictures System characterized by emotional (unpleasant, neutral, and pleasant), social (with humans) or non-social (without humans) content were recorded in non-alexithymic (NA), affective (AA) and cognitive alexithymic (CA) participants, selected on the basis of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale and the Bermond-Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire. All participants responded to questionnaires of empathy, social phobia, depression, and anxiety before the experiment and evaluated the arousal of the pictures after it.Results: Cognitive alexithymic group showed lower amplitudes of SCRs to pictures with social than without social relevance whereas the opposite pattern was observed for the NA group. Arousal emotional effects of the pictures on SCRs did not differ among groups. In addition, CA participants showed lower scores than NA in the Personal Taking sub-scale of the empathy questionnaire, while AA showed lower scores than NA in the fantasy sub-scale. The CA group showed higher social phobia, depression and anxiety scores, than the other two groups.Conclusion: This work has two original outcomes: first, affective alexithymics expressed lower empathic affective scores than other groups; second, alexithymia modulated the impact of the social relevance of the stimuli on the autonomic reactivity, this impact vanishing in affective alexithymics and reversing in cognitive alexithymics. Thus, though the groups could not be distinguished on the basis of emotional effect on SCRs, they clearly differed when the empathic characteristics and the autonomic impact of social relevance were considered. Finally, the described autonomic signature to social relevant information could contribute to elucidate the difficulty of alexithymics to deal with emotions during social transactions.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Autonomic Reactivity to Arousing Stimuli with Social and Non-social Relevance in Alexithymia

et al. 2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…It may have initially evolved as a means to bind a mother more closely to her young children, being later extended to other relationships within the group (Decety, 2015). It is perhaps for this reason that affective empathy is stronger in women than in men, whereas cognitive empathy is the same in both sexes (Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004;Goerlich-Dobre et al, 2015;Yang et al, 2009). Likewise, young children preferentially show affective empathy toward their mothers (Decety & Cowell, 2014).…”

Section: Affective Empathymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Individuals with high cognitive empathy have denser gray matter in the midcingulate cortex and the adjacent dorsomedial prefontal cortex, whereas individuals with high affective empathy have denser gray matter in the insula cortex (Eres et al, 2015). A high capacity for empathy is also associated with enlargement of the amygdala, which controls responses to facial expressions of fear and to other signs of distress (Goerlich-Dobre et al, 2015;Marsh et al, 2014). The left amygdala seems to specialize more in the affective component of empathy and in the related construct of emotional self-awareness (Goerlich-Dobre et al, 2015).…”

Section: Affective Empathymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A high capacity for empathy is also associated with enlargement of the amygdala, which controls responses to facial expressions of fear and to other signs of distress (Goerlich-Dobre et al, 2015;Marsh et al, 2014). The left amygdala seems to specialize more in the affective component of empathy and in the related construct of emotional self-awareness (Goerlich-Dobre et al, 2015). Two studies, one American and one English, have found that "conservatives" tend to have a larger right amygdala (Kanai et al, 2011;Schreiber et al, 2013).…”

Section: Affective Empathymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The Hajnal Line and Gene-Culture Coevolution in Northwest Europe

Fröst¹

2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

North and west of a line running from Trieste to St. Petersburg, social relations have long conformed to the Western European Marriage Pattern, i.e., men and women marry relatively late; many people never marry; children usually leave the nuclear family to form new households, and households often have non-kin members. This pattern goes back at least to the thirteenth century and perhaps to prehistoric times. I argue that this environment of weaker kinship caused northwest Europeans to create communities based on shared moral rules, rather than shared kinship. Community members enforced these rules by monitoring not only the behavior of other members but also their own behavior and even their own thoughts. Initially, this new mindset did not have a genetic basis. Individuals acquired it within the bounds of phenotypic plasticity. Over time, however, a genetic basis would have developed through the survival and reproduction of individuals who were better at being socially independent, at obeying universal rules, at monitoring other community members, and at self-monitoring, self-judging, and self-punishing. These psychological adaptations-independent social orientation, universal rule adherence, affective empathy, guilt proneness-are moderately to highly heritable. Although they are complex, they required only minor evolutionary changes to evolve out of mechanisms that were already present but limited to specific behavioral contexts. Affective empathy, for instance, is a species-wide trait but usually confined to relations with close kin, particularly between a mother and her young children. An evolutionary scenario is proposed, and two questions discussed. Are these mental traits too complex to have evolved over a span of 30 to 300 generations? Are they too altruistic to be sustainable?

show abstract

Genetic Polymorphisms

Votinov¹,

Goerlich²

2020

The Wiley Encyclopedia of Health Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The left amygdala: A shared substrate of alexithymia and empathy

Cited by 49 publications

References 88 publications

Autonomic Reactivity to Arousing Stimuli with Social and Non-social Relevance in Alexithymia

Autonomic Reactivity to Arousing Stimuli with Social and Non-social Relevance in Alexithymia

The Hajnal Line and Gene-Culture Coevolution in Northwest Europe

Genetic Polymorphisms

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About