Abstract
The ability to empathise relies in part on using one's own affective experience to simulate the affective experience of others. This process is supported by a number of brain areas including the anterior insula (AI), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and the amygdala. Children with conduct problems (CP), and in particular those with high levels of callous-unemotional traits (CP/HCU) present with less empathy than their peers. They also show reduced neural response in areas supporting empathic processing when viewing other people in distress. The current study focused on identifying brain areas co-activated during affective introspection of: i) One's own emotions (‘Own emotion’); ii) Others' emotions (‘Other emotion’); and iii) One's feelings about others' emotions (‘Feel for other’) during fearful vs neutral scenarios in typically developing boys (TD; n = 31), boys with CP/HCU (n = 31), and boys with CP and low levels of CU (CP/LCU; n = 33). The conjunction analysis across conditions within the TD group revealed significant clusters of activation in the AI, ACC/mPFC, and occipital cortex. Conjunction analyses across conditions in the CP/HCU and CP/LCU groups did not identify these areas as significantly activated. However, follow-up analyses were not able to confirm statistically significant differences between groups across the whole network, and Bayes-factor analyses did not provide substantial support for either the null or alternate hypotheses. Post-hoc comparisons indicated that the lack of conjunction effects in the CP/HCU group may reflect reduced affective introspection in the ‘Other emotion’ and ‘Feel for other’ conditions, and by reduced affective introspection in the ‘Own emotion’ condition in the CP/LCU group. These findings provide limited and ultimately equivocal evidence for altered affective introspection regarding others in CP/HCU, and altered affective introspection for own emotions in CP/LCU, and highlight the need for further research to systematically investigate the precise nature of empathy deficits in children with CP.
Highlights
Empathy is the capacity to understand and resonate with the affective experience of another (Singer and Lamm, 2009; Lockwood, 2016)
We observed additional group differences in ADHD symptom severity scales with elevated scores in both conduct problems (CP) groups compared to typically developing (TD), but the CP and high levels of CU traits (CP/HCU) and CP/LCU groups did not differ from each other (p = 1.000)
We used a task with evocative photographs and short auditory vignettes to investigate the neural basis of empathy in TD boys, boys with CP/HCU, and boys with CP/LCU
Summary
Empathy is the capacity to understand and resonate with the affective experience of another (Singer and Lamm, 2009; Lockwood, 2016). The ability of individuals with psychopathy to hurt and manipulate other people without concern for their welfare, suggests an atypical empathic/vicarious response to other people's distress (Viding and McCrory, 2015; Lockwood, 2016) It would be entirely inappropriate (and erroneous) to diagnose children with psychopathy, a subgroup of children with conduct problems (CP) who present with callous-unemotional (CU) traits present with atypical empathic responses to other people's suffering (Blair et al, 2014; Viding and McCrory, 2015). There have been considerable efforts in recent years to understand the neurocognitive basis of empathy problems observed in these children (Blair et al, 2014; Viding and McCrory, 2015)
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