Abstract
Empathy is the capacity to understand and experience the feeling state of others. While individuals attribute negative empathic responses to their own feelings, they would endure personal distress that can be harmful to social interaction. However, the neural mechanism of personal distress remains unclear. Here, we examined the neural substrates of personal distress by combining structural (Voxel-based morphometry (VBM)) and functional (resting-state functional connectivity (FC) analysis) MRI approaches in 53 college students (aged 19–26). A negative correlation was found between a trait measure of personal distress and gray matter (GM) volume in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC). FC analyses with the dmPFC as a seed further revealed that the connectivity between the dmPFC and posterior insula was positively correlated with the personal distress, and the connectivities between the dmPFC and the anterior middle cingulate cortex, left lateral frontal cortex, and left inferior parietal gyrus were negatively correlated with the personal distress. Our results suggested that personal distress is underlain by neural substrates associated with both cognitive and affective mechanisms. Taken together, the structural and functional correlates of personal distress revealed in the present findings shed new light into the understanding of empathy.
Highlights
Empathy refers to the ability to understand, infer and experience the feeling state of others in interpersonal interaction
We hypothesized that individual differences in personal distress could be reflected in gray matter (GM) volume variation in brain regions related to cognitive empathy, especially those indicated in ToM processing; and in variation in functional connectivities between cognitive- and affectiverelated regions
The results showed that personal distress was negatively correlated with GM volume within a cluster in dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) (MNI coordinates: −8, 38, 39; cluster size: 617), indicating that individuals with less volume in dmPFC tended to experience personal distress during empathy (Figure 1 and Table 1)
Summary
Empathy refers to the ability to understand, infer and experience the feeling state of others in interpersonal interaction. We hypothesized that individual differences in personal distress could be reflected in gray matter (GM) volume variation in brain regions related to cognitive empathy, especially those indicated in ToM processing; and in variation in functional connectivities between cognitive- and affectiverelated regions. To this end, the current study assessed a trait measure of personal distress (Davis, 1994) in a group of participants from Sun Yat-sen University and acquired their structural and resting-state functional MRI data. Gray matter volume was examined using the Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) method (Ashburner and Friston, 2000), and FC was investigated using the seed-based analysis approach (Friston, 1994)
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