April 16 - Empathy
Lindsay Morton
The main focus for the week is on empathy. Although every article seemed to define this process differently, empathy is one’s ability to understand and affectively respond to the emotional expression of another. Although the article by Zaki, Bolger, and Ochsner (2008) was a bit of a “no duh;” I thought the methodology and theory was well-lined out. More importantly, I think it highlighted the need to include both parties when studying interactive behavior. It would be especially informative if future neuroscience articles examined dual recordings of empathic responding. On a different note, the Preston et al. (2007) article experimentally confirmed an idea that was given to me in a grade school vocabulary lesson about the difference between empathy and sympathy – namely, that one can only empathize with another when they have in fact experienced something similar. Although I would have liked to see if their individual difference measures had any correlates to the behavioral and neurological data, this article provided insight into the phenomenon of empathy.
On the whole, the articles for the week highlighted the neurological correlates of the empathy process, rather than the effect that empathy has on behavior. Specifically, it was found that sections of the insula and anterior cingulate have interacting connections with limbic areas, such as the amygdala, and regions of the prefrontal cortex, such as the superior temporal and inferior frontal cortices. Because the insula seemed to be such an important cortical structure in our readings for this week, I decided to check out where it is in the brain. Surprisingly this is not as clear as one might think, as there is disagreement about whether or not the insula is its own lobe in the telencephalon (the cerebral cortex) or if it is a portion of the temporal lobe. After examining several images online, it appears that the insula lies at the base of the primary sensory and motor areas and is exterior to the amygdala, which makes sense considering that it has such strong physical and functional links to these areas. In some aside reading, I found it interesting that only humans and great apes may use the insula for higher order cognition. In addition, the insula and the anterior cingulate cortex of humans and great apes are the only areas of the brain that contain von Economo (or spindle) neurons, a unique polar-shaped neuron which may impact a variety of cognitive abilities and have been found to be damaged in Alzheimer’s patients. One should also note that spindle neurons have recently been found in the brains of some species of whales, dolphins, and elephants, which is pretty cool (to me) seeing that great apes, humans, and these animals have the largest brains on earth and all evidence social-emotional bonds between individuals. Recent theorizing even suggests that these neurons may have evolved (relatively recently in the grand scheme of things) to rapidly convey important social information!
When reading the articles for this week, I began to consider the self and other distinctions that we discussed in the beginning of the semester. During that class session, we talked about the importance of medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) activation – specifically, how the mPFC is selectively activated for self-relevant information, compared to activation for close others (e.g., Heatherton et al., 2006). I think it’s important to highlight that without this differential activation, individuals would experience what Lamm, Batson, and Decety (2007) term “empathic overarousal” (p. 43). A follow-up study to examining both self/other distinctions and empathy could examine patients with lesions in the this region to further support the model in which the mPFC plays a role in the ability to distinguish between one’s own emotions and the observed, or simulated, emotions of others. Another interesting parallel between this week and past discussions is the role played by emotion regulation and reappraisal in empathic responses. Specifically, Lamm et al. (2007) showed higher pain intensity and unpleasantness ratings for ineffective treatment stimuli compared to effective treatment stimuli. The authors suggest that this finding may be due to a top-down evaluation mechanism in which participants focus on the long-term outcomes, rather than the immediate experience of pain. An interesting topic to discus may be how these processes interact and which brain regions might be involved.
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Lindsay C. Morton, MS
Psychology Department
University at Albany
1400 Washington Avenue
Albany, NY 12222
(973) 534-0530
Camille Barnes
This week’s articles took an in depth look at empathy.
Carr, Iacoboni, Dubeau, Mazziotta, Lenzi look at the critical role of
action representation in empathy, which allows us to understand the
feelings and emotions of others. To investigate this, the researchers
instructed participants to either imitate or observe a variety of
facial expressions (which were expressing emotions of happy, sad,
angry, surprise, disgust, and afraid) while being imaged by fMRI. One
thing that would be interesting to explore, would be to have video of
the participants (or some sort of muscle monitoring of the face), to
see if the pure observation group engages in any imitating, and also
to determine if those who imitate the facial expressions more have
more brain activation as well. The researchers found that similar
areas activated by both conditions but activated more in imitate
condition. The areas activated were premotor face area, dorsal sector
of parsopercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus, superior temporal
sulcus, insula, and amygdala. So basically, the insula provides
communication between action representation networks and the limbic
areas. This system is the pathway necessary for empathy to occur. It
is interesting to me that empathy can be evoked simply viewing facial
expressions in isolation, in the absence of context, This pathway
must be active nearly constantly in the real world, as individuals are
almost always evaluating others expressions. One interesting note, is
that this article had several mentions of neuro-psych meta-anlyses,
which seems like a good idea, since so many of these studies have such
low sample size, I am just surprised that not many other articles
mention meta-analyses in neuro-psych.
Lamm, Batson, and Decety look at self-other differentiation and
cognitive appraisal to determine differences in reactions when viewing
others in distress. Perspective taking was manipulated by
instructions that indicated to instruction to imagine the feelings of
the patient (‘‘imagine other’’) or to imagine oneself to be in
patient’s situation (‘‘imagine self’’). Cognitive appraisal was
manipulated by telling participants if the medical treatment was
successful for the patients they viewed. Participants watched videos
of “patients” while undergoing fMRI imaging and also rated intensity,
imagined pain and unpleasantness of patient, and rated group of
photos, for if person was a previously shown patient or not (and
identify their treatment group).
With this study, I was impressed by the great lengths the
experimenters went through to make the videos appear authentic (from
the pictures provided they looked very real and only included faces
with natural pain responses). Even though I am a little skeptical In
the ability to switch from other to self perspective and back again so
easily, the use of within subjects design is kind of nice in these
studies since there is so much variation from brain to brain, and in
these studies the participant is their own control. Perspective
taking and cognitive appraisal did affect the behavioral measures of
affect. Perspective taking differentially activated the middle
insula, aMCC, medial and lateral premotor areas, and selectively in
left and right parietal cortices, whereas information on the
effectiveness of treatment affected activations in the perigenual
anterior cingulate cortex, in the ventromedial orbitofrontal cortex,
in the right lateral middle frontal gyrus, and in the cerebellum.
Zaki, Bolger, and Ochsner focused on empathetic accuracy.
Previously researchers have suggested that affective empathy
positively correlates with empathetic accuracy, but little research
has supported this claim. These authors suggest that empathic
accuracy may depend on both targets’ tendency to express emotion and
perceivers’ tendency to empathically share that emotion. They test
this in two phases. In phase one targets discussed emotional events
and later viewed their videos while completing continuous ratings of
how positive or negative they had felt while speaking. In phase 2,
another group of participants watched the videos and continuously
rated how they thought the target was feeling during each video. To
determine accuracy, researchers looked at the correlations of emotion
scores between the actors and the perceivers. They found that trait
empathy was only related to empathetic accuracy when target’s trait
expressivity was considered.
Preston, Bechara, et al investigated the neural pathways
for cognitive empathy, when someone puts themselves in another’s
shoes, figuratively. In study 1, participants engaged in imagery of
either a personal experience of fear or anger from their own past, a
non-personal emotional experience as if it were happening to them; and
non-emotional, but personal experience, while PET scans were
administered. In study 2, Eight participants imagined experiences of
anger and nine participants imagined experiences of fear. Procedures
were identical to those described above for Experiment 1, except that
participants in this experiment were specifically instructed to select
the non-personal story to which they could relate the least.
Participants reported higher levels of emotional intensity (overall
and for the specific emotion), vividness of the imagery, had higher
heart rates and greater respiration when imagining the personal than
the non-personal scenarios, but only when the non-personal scenarios
were selected so that participants cannot relate to them. When
participants could easily relate they had similar reactions to the non-
personal and the personal scenarios. These results show that the
important component for cognitive empathy is whether or not an
individual is able to relate to someone else. When the participants
could relate less to the other person’s scenario, in both fear and
anger conditions, there was more activation for the non-personal than
personal imagery in left inferior temporal and fusiform gyri and
visual association, and face processing areas. These are interesting
results, that were have almost identical reactions to impersonal but
relatable situations as we do for our own personal emotional
situations. This is surprising to be since we often see distinct
differences in self-processing. I am curious what factors in a
situation make them relatable versus unrelatable? Are situations of
close others automatically relatable?
David Dinwiddie
I read the Zaki et. al. (2008) article first which I felt worked out well. This way I got a little bit of an understanding on empathy research before adding in the neuroscience component. Empathy is considered to have two components. The first is an affective component which is one’s ability to feel the emotions which a target feels. The second component is cognitive and consists of one’s ability to understands and accurately evaluate to cognitive states of another. The correlation between these components has not been observed in most studies which look at these components of empathy. I liked the methods they used in this experiment. Participants first were videotaped describing an emotional event in their life and then watched the videotape and rated their emotions while they were telling the story. A second participant then watched the same videos and rated the emotions of the participants. The perceivers were pretty good at detecting the targets emotions but there was great variance in the accuracy. Perceivers trait affective empathy was not related to accuracy scores but the expressivity scores of the targets was related. There was also an interaction between expressivity and affective empathy. Greater expressivity improved the accuracy scores more for perceivers with high affective empathy scores than those with low scores. This is interesting because this can explain why null results were found in the past. The effect can only be observed when there is high expressivity. It is equally interesting to me why there are null results when the target is low in expressivity. Why to people high in affective empathy struggle just as much as those who are low in affective empathy when expressivity is low? I believe in the result due to its consistency with the past research but it still doesn’t make sense to me. I would almost expect results that say anyone can judge people when they are high in expressiveness but only those high in affective empathy can judge those with low expressiveness accurately.
I next read the Preston article which was a nice jump because it included the neural substrates of cognitive empathy. I had a lot of trouble understanding a lot of this article. Their methods section seemed to jump a lot rather than explaining what was done in order. I believe the anger and fear scenarios which they were told to imagine themselves in were the impersonal events. They rated these scenarios on how well they could relate to these scenarios and the scenarios they could relate to most created similar emotional intensity to personal scenarios. There were no neurological differences between personal and impersonal scenarios. I had a bit of a problem with the scenarios they used. Is reading a little scenario really like putting yourself in the shoes of an actual other person? I don’t think it is. I can feel bad for another person by putting myself in their shoes but I won’t feel anything similar by trying to put myself into a scenario which I know is made up and which no one is actually going through. I think this experiment runs into a lot of the common problems which lab studies will run into when trying to create strong emotions.
I next read the Carr et. al. (2003) article which was a nice summary of the neural correlates of empathy. In this experiment participants were either asked to observe or imitate the emotions displayed by faces which were presented to them. The premotor face area, the dorsal sector of pars opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus, the superior temporal sulcus, the insula, and the amygdala all showed greater activation during imitation trials than observation trials. The insula may be a critical connection from action representation to emotion because it connects the superior temporal and inferior frontal cortices to the limbic system. A weak connection could explain why some people have trouble with empathy. Going in my typical clinical direction I find this potentially useful. I am not certain if the insula in particular is impaired in psychopaths or even if this impairment would be a cause of effect but it could be interesting to look at.
The last article I read was the Lamm article. I feel like this study may have done a better job than the Preston article in creating a situation where one may feel empathy for another but it still was not enough. I would feel pain watching someone in surgery but watching someone wearing headphones and a turtleneck make faces to aversive noises is not the same. There is no way that participants would believe that the videos were taken in a hospital.Participants were either asked to put themselves in the position of the patient or imagine their feelings. As compared to imagining their feeling there were greater activation in the following areas when they put themselves in the position of the patient. Bilateral insula, left supramarginal gyrus (BA 40), left middle frontal gyrus (Brodmann’s area 9), and in several areas involved in motor control such as the SMA, the right dorsal premotor cortex (lateral BA 6), the putamen, and the caudate nucleus. These results seem consistent with the results found by Carr which points to the importance of the insula.
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Jen Vosilla
As everyone knows, this week’s topic is Empathy. Usually our articles tend to use very similar materials and methods, but this time I think all of them were different. Of course, that presents a problem in comparing them, yet many of the articles found significant activation in the same areas which is definitely support for their theories.
Even though the Zaki, Bolger & Oschner (2008) article is the most recent article that we read, I thought I’d start with that. The main point of the article is to suggest that future research use an interactionist approach to empathic accuracy. The authors stated that although past research has had trouble linking the cognitive and affective aspects of empathy, this may be because they have failed to take into account the affect that the target may have on a perceiver’s ability to accurately perceive the target’s emotions. Therefore, their study looked at the perceiver’s trait affective empathy (as measured by the Balanced Emotional Empathy Scale) and empathic accuracy (used as measure of cognitive empathy; correlation between perceivers’ ratings of targets’ feelings and targets’ ratings of their own feelings), as well as the target’s expressivity. Video clips were compiled from a Target Phase in which the participants discussed the 4 most negative and 4 most positive events in their life while being videotaped. Using a sliding 9-point Likert scale, perceivers continuously rated how positive or negative the target was feeling. The results indicated that greater target expressivity improved empathic accuracy of perceivers with high affective empathy more than that of perceivers with low affective empathy. Also, though trait affective empathy had no relationship with empathic accuracy for the least expressive targets, it did predict empathic accuracy when targets were most expressive.
Carr, Iacoboni, Dubeau, Mazziotta & Lenzi (2003) tested an action representation model of empathy. During an fMRI, participants view stimuli (6 emotions of happy, sad, angry, surprise, disgust and fear presented in 3 sets either including only eyes, only mouths or whole faces) presented through magnet-compatible goggles. They were told to either imitate/generate the emotion presented or to observe. The authors predicted and found that activation during observation and imitation of emotions was similar, but there was greater activity during imitation in the premotor areas, inferior frontal cortex, superior temporal cortex, insula and amygdala. The authors concluded that empathy is caused by activating a mechanism of action representation that is associated with the emotion being witnessed.
Lamm, Batson & Decety (2007) stated that the 3 common components of the definitions of empathy in the literature are an affective aspect, cognitive aspect and a monitoring mechanism to discern between self vs. other experiences. In their study, they manipulated perspective (self vs. other) and cognitive appraisals (effective or non-effective treatment). Participants watched a series of video clips of “patients” with a neurological illness that were undergoing a new, painful medical treatment that involved hearing sounds of specific frequencies and amplitudes. Participants were told to imagine themselves or another in the painful situation and notified whether the treatment had been effective or not for that patient. Participants also filled out a series of behavioral measures. The results of perspective-taking found that for the self condition there was greater activity in the left parietal cortex (self-agency area), and the amygdala, insula and aMCC (affective response to threat/pain areas), while for the other-perspective the right parietal cortex was selectively involved. The results for cognitive appraisal found stronger activation in the OFC (emotion reappraisal area), aMCC, insula, and amygdala and higher pain intensity and unpleasantness ratings for the non-effective treatment condition. Overall, I thought this article was well-structured and incorporated a lot of past research findings that supported their own findings.
The Preston et. Al (2007) article specifically looked at cognitive empathy, taking the PET scan after the participant indicated that they were feeling the target emotion. Participants in this study imagined 3 scenarios (a personal experience of own-Personal condition, imagining oneself in an equivalent experience of another- Nonpersonal conditions, & a non-emotional experience of own – Neutral condition). Two experiments were conducted with the difference being that in Experiment 1 participants were instructed to choose 1 of 7 nonpersonal scenarios that participant could relate to the most, and in Experiment 2, that they could relate to the least. Results found no significant differences in activation between personal and nonpersonal conditions in Experiment 1 (most relatable nonpersonal scenario). However, there was more activation in the left inferior temporal, fusiform gyri, and higher-order visual association areas during the nonpersonal imagery in Experiment 2 (least relatable). The authors conclude that people experience “true empathy” when they can relate to the observed situation, but use perspective-taking to achieve empathy in unrelatable situations (“cognitive empathy”).
Stuart Daman
did (at least this sentence), read this single sentence again, "The
peak of activation reported here in primary motor cortex during
imitation of facial emotional expressions corresponds well with the
location of the primary motor mouth area as determined by a meta-
analysis of published positron-emission tomography (PET) studies, by a
meta-analysis of original data in 30 subjects studied with PET, and by
a consensus probabilistic description of the location of the primary
motor mouth area obtained merging the results of the two previously
described meta-analyses." Yeah, that's one sentence, choke me. The
only other things I have to say about this article are my discussion
questions:
- Participants in their study were instructed to "internally
generate" the emotions they saw. I wonder if this process is to any
extent automatic. That is, when people simply view the emotional
expressions, how is activation different from when they internally
generate them? I'm not sure if activation might simply be less
intense, or if the strictly automatic components might activate
different areas of the brain.
- I wonder how much subsequent research has investigated one of their
final discussion points. This is regarding their lumping of emotion
into one category. We've read plenty of papers already on how emotions
are represented in the brain, but this research introduces the new
aspect of whether it's facially imitated or internally generated. If
activation of different emotions is in different places, how will it
differ, specifically, for specific emotions? This could be interesting
because it would allow us to see whether there is a single mechanism
for differentiating facially represented and internally generated
emotions, or if it is specific to individual emotions; which their
study cannot tell.
I feel like the Lamm, Batson and Decety (2007) paper may be one of the
best ones we've read. It's very thorough and has a lot of insightful
information in its discussion. One of the early shortcomings I see to
their study is that they are talking about empathy but only looking at
pain responses, empathy isn't only about pain is it? What about
empathy for other emotions (e.g. positive ones?). Another interesting
point was their selection of only people that seemed to be high in
empathy. How might activation patterns differ in people low in
empathy? I'm not sure if there's a specific basis for expecting
otherwise, but it's always interesting to know as much as we can. Are
the activations simply less or different qualitatively? The other
thing might be to look at brain patterns for people notably low in
empathy, such as persons with antisocial personality disorder.
And those weren't even my discussion questions! (although I'm going to
count them as one of them) I thought it was particularly interesting
how they discuss the differences in empathic concern and pain response
depending on the Self and Other conditions. So we have more empathic
concern in an Other condition, but more pain in the Self condition.
How can we use this information? The authors drop the word
"altruistic" in one form or another a couple of times, but which
experience is more likely to lead to altruistic behavior? The authors
do talk about altruistic motivation, as being related to the empathic
concern more than personal pain, but if people take the more personal
route and imagine that they truly are the person experiencing the
pain; might they be more likely to engage in an altruistic behavior?
The authors' discussion seems so suggest that the empathic concern is
all that matters, but I wonder what everyone else thinks.
The paper by Preston et al. (2007) was also a pretty good read.
However, they mention that one of their analyses may not have yielded
significant results because of a lack of power ... No kidding, your
total sample is less than 20 ppl... low power, eh? *smacks forehead*
I'm finding some things about these articles a little bit confusing.
We are talking about empathy and memory and how it's represented in
the brain, in this study. Models of memory already suggest that when
we retrieve things from long-term memory, we are not, per se,
retrieving a perfect record of what happened at that date and time.
Many of these newer models specify that memory is reconstructive, that
is, when retrieving from long-term memory, we reconstruct the events
of that situation. This is one reason memory can so easily be wrong,
if you fill in a gap with a wrong piece of information, the memory can
be inaccurate. Also, this research shows that when we do this
reconstruction, areas of the brain are activated similarly to how they
are activated when it first occurred. As far as I can tell, this is
synonymous with what we are talking about now. And mirror neurons. So,
when we take the perspective of another, of course similar areas are
activated, they're all perceiving the same damn thing, there just
tends to be these tiny not-even-always-significant areas active that
differentiate self from other.
One of the main points of these studies was that empathizing for
situation to which we can relate yield more self-like activation than
situations we do not relate to as much. I have two questions or
concerns about this result. Is the activation qualitatively different
between situations we do and do not relate to? Or is this some gradual
change in levels of activation in different areas, depending on how
much we can relate to the other person? Second, I think it would be
interesting for another study to manipulate the degree of relation
within-subjects. In other words, instead of showing it in two studies
as they did here, show it in one study. As a follow-up, these
researchers did NOT, per se, show that activation was different
between highly related and not highly related situations, only between
each of these and self perceptions.
I also found it really strange that they found differences in skin
conductance and EMG data between early and late neutral trials, but
only in the second study. Why were these different between the two
studies? Did they talk about this in their discussion? (if so, I
missed it) What's going on with this?
The final paper, by Zaki, Bolger & Ochsner (2008) was interesting as
well. It also used multiple regression, allowing for continuous
predictors, showing that things were not qualitatively different, but
differed across a continuum. The fact that highly expressive targets
were read more accurately is interesting, supporting that "if-then"
model they explain. One thing I wonder is how conscious people are of
these sorts of affects. I think it's likely that what target
expressiveness is a personality trait that manifests itself in
nonverbal actions. It was these nonverbal actions that perceivers were
able to read and use to rate the targets. But how aware were they of
this? Perhaps more generally, how aware are people of how much they
use nonverbal information?
The data of these authors suggests that it's really important to keep
expressivity in mind, rather than simply looking at how well people
can read others. I wonder how activation in the brain would be
different between the people watching themselves and the people
watching someone else. Would activation be essentially the same? Or
would people watching themselves still have activation in those areas
specific to the self?