Trait compassion is associated with the neural substrate of empathy

Abstract

Individual differences in the personality trait Agreeableness underlie humans' ability to interpret social cues and coordinate effectively with others. However, previous investigations of the neural basis of Agreeableness have yielded largely inconsistent results. Recent evidence has demonstrated that Agreeableness can be divided into two, correlated subdimensions. Compassion reflects tendencies toward empathy, sympathy, and concern for others, while Politeness reflects tendencies toward compliance and refraining from aggression and exploitation. The present study seeks to clarify the neural substrates of Agreeableness by examining whether structural differences in the brain show distinct associations with Compassion and Politeness. Results of a meta-analysis of fMRI studies examining empathy were used to generate hypotheses about the brain regions and networks that underlie trait Compassion. Results of a large-scale structural neuroimaging investigation (N = 275) were largely consistent with the meta-analysis: Compassion was positively correlated with gray matter volume in the bilateral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and anterior insula (AI). Further, these differences appear to be associated with Compassion specifically, as opposed to Politeness, suggesting that these two traits have at least partially distinct neuroanatomical substrates.

A Framework for Testing Causality in Personality Research

“…Of course, even though research showed that it is possible to change a personality trait, this would not imply that biological factors do not play a role or that they cannot be used to reveal interesting properties of traits (e.g. Hou et al, ). It is also possible that some traits could be better understood as networks and that others may reflect more the effect of biological (latent) variables (Mõttus & Allerhand, in press) and that their dynamics could be better understood through neuroscientific techniques (Allen & DeYoung, ).…”

“…In this view, both genetic and environmental forces are thought to causally affect cybernetic parameters (and thus traits), therefore the Cybernetic Big 5 Theory is in principle compatible both with causal states involving different genetic and biological conditions and with causal states involving different environments. Nonetheless, manipulations of environments have not been particularly central to this framework, which focused more on the exploration of the neural bases of traits (Allen & DeYoung, 2016;Hou et al, 2017).…”

Uncovering the Motivational Core of Traits: The Case of Conscientiousness

“…To assuage potential deviations from normality, a nonparanormal transformation was applied before network estimation (Liu, Lafferty, & Wasserman, 2009). For each node, we examined its predictability, the proportion of variance of each node that is explained within the network model, which is considered a more interpretable summary of the role of a node within the network (Haslbeck & Waldorp, 2017), compared, for example, with centrality metrics (Bringmann et al, 2019). The stability of the network results was inspected through nonparametric bootstrap, and the stability of the predictability index was calculated using the correlation stability coefficient (CS coefficient), which is defined as the maximum proportion of cases that can be dropped such that the resulting estimate correlates more than 0.7 with the original centrality estimate with 95% probability in case–dropping bootstrap resamples.…”

“…These generators have been mainly conceived of as biological in nature. This view is often supported by studies demonstrating that neural structures predict at least some trait variance (Hou et al, 2017; Rueter, Abram, MacDonald, Rustichini, & DeYoung, 2018) and by evidence regarding the heritability of personality traits (Sanchez‐Roige, Gray, MacKillop, Chen, & Palmer, 2018; Vukasović & Bratko, 2015), albeit recent research suggests, for instance, that the genetic influence on personality might be aspecific and not necessarily in correspondence of broad phenotypic traits (Mõttus et al, 2019).…”

<p>Do All Types of Compassion Increase Prosocial Lying?</p>

“…Trait compassion is an important reflection of an individual's personality but is also a baseline at which state compassion is induced. 16,17 In previous studies, compassion was reported in different scale rating. 2,4,18 State compassion can be triggered by witnessing or learning about the physical or emotional pain of other individuals.…”