Tracking emotions in the brain – Revisiting the Empathic Accuracy Task

Nuria K Mackes,Dennis Golm,Owen G O'Daly,Sagari Sarkar,Edmund J.S Sonuga-Barke,Graeme Fairchild,Mitul A Mehta

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.05.080

Nuria K Mackes, Dennis Golm + Show 5 more

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.05.080

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Journal: NeuroImage	Publication Date: Jun 8, 2018
Citations: 43	License type: cc-by

Affiliation: King's College London, University of Bath

Abstract

Many empathy tasks lack ecological validity due to their use of simplistic stimuli and static analytical approaches. Empathic accuracy tasks overcome these limitations by using autobiographical emotional video clips. Usually, a single measure of empathic accuracy is computed by correlating the participants' continuous ratings of the narrator's emotional state with the narrator's own ratings.In this study, we validated a modified empathic accuracy task. A valence-independent rating of the narrator's emotional intensity was added to provide comparability between videos portraying different primary emotions and to explore changes in neural activity related to variations in emotional intensity over time. We also added a new neutral control condition to investigate general emotional processing. In the scanner, 34 healthy participants watched 6 video clips of people talking about an autobiographical event (2 sad, 2 happy and 2 neutral clips) while continuously rating the narrator's emotional intensity.Fluctuation in perceived emotional intensity correlated with activity in brain regions previously implicated in cognitive empathy (bilateral superior temporal sulcus, temporoparietal junction, and temporal pole) and affective empathy (right anterior insula and inferior frontal gyrus). When emotional video clips were compared to neutral video clips, we observed higher activity in similar brain regions. Empathic accuracy, on the other hand, was only positively related to activation in regions that have been implicated in cognitive empathy.Our modified empathic accuracy task provides a new method for studying the underlying components and dynamic processes involved in empathy. While the task elicited both cognitive and affective empathy, successful tracking of others' emotions relied predominantly on the cognitive components of empathy. The fMRI data analysis techniques developed here may prove valuable in characterising the neural basis of empathic difficulties observed across a range of psychiatric conditions.

Highlights

Empathy, has been defined as “an emotional response [... which] is similar to one's perception [...] and understanding [...] of the stimulus emotion, with recognition that the source of the emotion is not one's own.” (Cuff et al, 2016, page 150)
Results reported are based on Family-Wise Error (FWE) corrected threshold-free cluster enhancement (TFCE: pFWE < 0.05 (Smith and Nichols, 2009))
We demonstrated that fluctuations in participants' perceived emotional intensity ratings are correlated with activation in a network of brain regions previously implicated in empathy and broader aspects of social cognition

Summary

Introduction

Empathy, has been defined as “an emotional response [... which] is similar to one's perception [...] and understanding [...] of the stimulus emotion, with recognition that the source of the emotion is not one's own.” (Cuff et al, 2016, page 150). Identifying the neural substrates of empathy in healthy populations is important for understanding conditions that are characterised by empathic difficulties. The concept of empathy is considered to include separate affective (sharing others' emotion) and cognitive (understanding others' emotion) components (for example, Tousignant et al., 2017; Lockwood, 2016). Previous research has identified distinct clusters of brain regions involved in affective empathy: medial/anterior cingulate cortex (MCC, ACC), anterior insula (AI) (Fan et al, 2011; Lamm et al, 2011), and supplementary motor area (SMA) (Lamm et al, 2011). Within the broader domain of social cognition, cognitive empathy overlaps with the affective component of Theory of Mind (ToM) or mentalising, namely the capacity to infer other people's thoughts, emotions and intentions without necessarily sharing them (Wellman et al, 2001). A recent meta-analysis of 144 fMRI studies using ToM tasks (Molenberghs et al, 2016) identified the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC), ACC, precuneus, temporal pole (TP), posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTS) and temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) as key regions for mentalising

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