Journal
NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA
Volume 116, Issue -, Pages 126-135Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.02.010
Keywords
Empathy; Affect sharing; Prosocial motivation; Lesion model; Voxel-based morphometry; Neurodegeneration
Funding
- NIH [National Institute on Aging] [5 K23 AG021606, R01 AG029577, PPG P01 AG1972403, P50 AG02350]
- Larry L. Hillblom Foundation [2002/2J, 2007/2I]
- NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON AGING [K23AG021606, RF1AG029577, F32AG050434, R01AG029577, P50AG023501, P01AG019724] Funding Source: NIH RePORTER
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Affect sharing and prosocial motivation are integral parts of empathy that are conceptually and mechanistically distinct. We used a neurodegenerative disease (NDG) lesion model to examine the neural correlates of these two aspects of real-world empathic responding. The study enrolled 275 participants, including 44 healthy older controls and 231 patients diagnosed with one of five neurodegenerative diseases (75 Alzheimer's disease, 58 behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvF l ll), 42 semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA), 28 progressive supranuclear palsy, and 28 non-fluent variant primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA). Informants completed the Revised Self-Monitoring Scale's Sensitivity to the Expressive Behavior of Others (RSMS-EX) subscale and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index's Empathic Concern (IRI-EC) subscale describing the typical empathic behavior of the participants in daily life. Using regression modeling 6f the voxel based morphometry of Tl brain scans prepared using SPM8 DARTEL-based preprocessing, we isolated the variance independently contributed by the affect sharing and the prosocial motivation elements of empathy as differentially measured by the two scales. We found that the affect sharing component uniquely correlated with volume in right > left medial and lateral temporal lobe structures, including the amygdala and insula, that support emotion recognition, emotion generation, and emotional awareness. Prosocial motivation, in contrast, involved structures such as the nucleus accumbens (NaCC), caudate head, and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), which suggests that an individual must maintain the capacity to experience reward, to resolve ambiguity, and to inhibit their own emotional experience in order to effectively engage in spontaneous altruism as a component of their empathic response to others.
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