Neural correlates of empathic accuracy in adolescence

Abstract

Empathy, the ability to understand others' emotions, can occur through perspective taking and experience sharing. Neural systems active when adults empathize include regions underlying perspective taking (e.g. medial prefrontal cortex; MPFC) and experience sharing (e.g. inferior parietal lobule; IPL). It is unknown whether adolescents utilize networks implicated in both experience sharing and perspective taking when accurately empathizing. This question is critical given the importance of accurately understanding others' emotions for developing and maintaining adaptive peer relationships during adolescence. We extend the literature on empathy in adolescence by determining the neural basis of empathic accuracy, a behavioral assay of empathy that does not bias participants toward the exclusive use of perspective taking or experience sharing. Participants (N = 155, aged 11.1-15.5 years) watched videos of 'targets' describing emotional events and continuously rated the targets' emotions during functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning. Empathic accuracy related to activation in regions underlying perspective taking (MPFC, temporoparietal junction and superior temporal sulcus), while activation in regions underlying experience sharing (IPL, anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula) related to lower empathic accuracy. These results provide novel insight into the neural basis of empathic accuracy in adolescence and suggest that perspective taking processes may be effective for increasing empathy.

Keywords: adolescence; empathic accuracy; empathy; experience sharing; perspective taking.

Fig. 1.

Empathic accuracy task. Targets were filmed describing emotional events from their adolescence. The target then watched his or her videos while continuously rating his or her emotions as expressed in the video on a scale from ‘Very Negative’ to ‘Very Positive’ (A). These videos were shown to participants in this study, the perceivers, during an fMRI scan. Perceivers made continuous ratings of the target’s emotions in the video on the same rating scale used by the targets (B). Finally, empathic accuracy scores were determined by calculating the correlation between the perceiver’s ratings with the target’s ratings of his or her emotions (C).

Fig. 2.

Empathic accuracy by gender. Females had greater empathic accuracy than males [t(152) = −2.21, P = 0.029]. Error bars represent 95% CIs above and below the point estimates of the means (displayed as triangles). Raw data points are overlaid in grey.

Fig. 3.

BOLD activation related to empathic accuracy. Voxel-wise, wholebrain analysis (A) with regions where increased activation related to higher empathic accuracy are in orange/yellow, and regions where activation related to lower empathic accuracy are in light blue, thresholded using clusters determined by Z > 2.3 and a corrected threshold of P < 0.05. A priori ROIs are labeled and overlaid in red for regions related to PT and in dark blue for regions related to ES, as provided in Zaki et al. (2009), although not all 12 ROIs are depicted here. The ROIs are the same in the top of the panel. The underlay and coordinates are in MNI space. TPJ, temporal parietal junction; IPL, MNI, Montreal Neurological Institute; inferior parietal lobule; STS, superior temporal sulcus; VMPFC, ventral medial prefrontal cortex; DMPFC, dorsal medial prefrontal cortex; ACC, anterior cingulate cortex. ROI analysis (B) depicting that empathic accuracy-related activation across PT network was greater than ES network [F(1,151) = 28.8, P < 0.001]. Error bars represent 95% CIs above and below the point estimates of the means (displayed as triangles). Raw data are overlaid in grey.

Fig. 4.

Empathic accuracy-related activation and questionnaire measures. Greater empathic accuracy-related activation extracted from RTPJ was associated with higher self-reported empathic concern [A; t(151) = 2.70, P = 0.008] and PT [B; t(151) = 2.59, P = 0.010]. Greater self-reported adherence to prosocial norms was associated with more empathic accuracy-related activation extracted from right STS [C; t(151) = 2.79, P = 0.006], and the opposite relationship was found for right IPL [D; t(151) = −2.74, P = 0.007]. Regression lines and data points are adjusted for gender. Precision envelopes represent 95% CIs above and below the point estimates.