Abstract
This study investigates the neuronal correlates of empathic processing in children aged 4–8 years, an age range discussed to be crucial for the development of empathy. Empathy, defined as the ability to understand and share another person's inner life, consists of two components: affective (emotion-sharing) and cognitive empathy (Theory of Mind). We examined the hemodynamic responses of preschool and school children (N = 48), while they processed verbal (auditory) and non-verbal (cartoons) empathy stories in a passive following paradigm, using functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy. To control for the two types of empathy, children were presented blocks of stories eliciting either affective or cognitive empathy, or neutral scenes which relied on the understanding of physical causalities. By contrasting the activations of the younger and older children, we expected to observe developmental changes in brain activations when children process stories eliciting empathy in either stimulus modality toward a greater involvement of anterior frontal brain regions. Our results indicate that children's processing of stories eliciting affective and cognitive empathy is associated with medial and bilateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) activation. In contrast to what is known from studies using adult participants, no additional recruitment of posterior brain regions was observed, often associated with the processing of stories eliciting empathy. Developmental changes were found only for stories eliciting affective empathy with increased activation, in older children, in medial OFC, left inferior frontal gyrus, and the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Activations for the two modalities differ only little, with non-verbal presentation of the stimuli having a greater impact on empathy processing in children, showing more similarities to adult processing than the verbal one. This might be caused by the fact that non-verbal processing develops earlier in life and is more familiar.
Highlights
As social interaction is central to the life of human beings, paying attention to and trying to understand the cognitive and affective processes of others is important for the prediction and interpretation of their behavior
The results suggest that children and adults both activate the temporoparietal junction and the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) for Theory of Mind” (ToM) judgments, but differ in their activation patterns depending on task modality, e.g., children have higher activation in left IFG when processing non-verbal cartoons, whereas adults show higher activation in left IFG when processing verbal stimuli
We introduce the method of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to the field of neurodevelopmental studies on empathy processing, and we believe it is a valuable tool for research in this field. fNIRS has several advantages over other imaging methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) or PET, first of all, that no fixation of the head is needed
Summary
As social interaction is central to the life of human beings, paying attention to and trying to understand the cognitive and affective processes of others is important for the prediction and interpretation of their behavior. These skills are studied under the label of social cognition. Relatively little is known about the neural processing of socio-emotional information in children, it is well known that changes in many domains of cognition occur with development (Durston and Casey, 2006). The development of higher-level cognitive processes is discussed to covary with maturation of the prefrontal cortex throughout childhood and adolescence (Casey, 1999). The most anterior part of the prefrontal cortex, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), is supposed to support the processing of social cognition, while it is known to mature last in ontogeny (Barbey et al, 2009)
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