Overlapping and specific neural correlates for empathizing, affective mentalizing, and cognitive mentalizing: A coordinate-based meta-analytic study

Abstract

While the discussion on the foundations of social understanding mainly revolves around the notions of empathy, affective mentalizing, and cognitive mentalizing, their degree of overlap versus specificity is still unclear. We took a meta-analytic approach to unveil the neural bases of cognitive mentalizing, affective mentalizing, and empathy, both in healthy individuals and pathological conditions characterized by social deficits such as schizophrenia and autism. We observed partially overlapping networks for cognitive and affective mentalizing in the medial prefrontal, posterior cingulate, and lateral temporal cortex, while empathy mainly engaged fronto-insular, somatosensory, and anterior cingulate cortex. Adjacent process-specific regions in the posterior lateral temporal, ventrolateral, and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex might underpin a transition from abstract representations of cognitive mental states detached from sensory facets to emotionally-charged representations of affective mental states. Altered mentalizing-related activity involved distinct sectors of the posterior lateral temporal cortex in schizophrenia and autism, while only the latter group displayed abnormal empathy related activity in the amygdala. These data might inform the design of rehabilitative treatments for social cognitive deficits.

Keywords: activation likelihood estimation; affective mentalizing; autism; cognitive mentalizing; empathy; mentalizing; meta-analysis; schizophrenia; theory of mind.

FIGURE 1

Brain activations associated with mentalizing, cognitive mentalizing, affective mentalizing, and empathy in healthy individuals, resulting from the ALE analyses. From top to bottom, the figure reports the brain structures consistently associated with processing others' mental states (mentalizing, network, red), others' cognitive mental states (cognitive mentalizing network, violet), others' affective mental states (affective mentalizing, green), as well as with empathic processing (empathy network, blue). All the reported clusters survived a statistical threshold of p <.05, corrected for cluster‐level family wise error (FWE). The color bar indicates consistent brain activity intensity

FIGURE 2

Commonalities and differences across mentalizing, cognitive mentalizing, affective mentalizing and empathy networks in healthy individuals, resulting from the ALE analyses. From top to bottom, the figure depicts with different colors the common and specific brain structures across cognitive mentalizing and affective mentalizing (a), mentalizing and empathy (b), cognitive mentalizing and empathy (c), as well as affective mentalizing and empathy (d). All the reported clusters survived a statistical threshold of p <.05 and minimum volume size of 100 mm³. AffM, affective mentalizing; CogM, cognitive mentalizing; and Emp, empathy

FIGURE 3

Differential brain responses to mentalizing and empathic processing between schizophrenic or autistic patients and healthy controls, resulting from the ALE analyses. All the reported clusters survived a statistical threshold of p <.05, corrected for cluster‐level family wise error (FWE)

FIGURE 4

Commonalities and differences across cognitive mentalizing, affective mentalizing, and empathy networks in healthy individuals, resulting from the ALE analyses. Cognitive mentalizing, affective mentalizing, and empathy networks in this figure are superimposed onto the same brain render and slices. All the reported clusters survived a statistical threshold of p <.05, corrected for cluster‐level family wise error (FWE). AffM, affective mentalizing; CogM, cognitive mentalizing; and Emp, empathy