The neural substrates of cognitive empathy

Abstract

Neuroscientific research has consistently found that the perception of an affective state in another activates the observer's own neural substrates for the corresponding state, which is likely the neural mechanism for “true empathy.” However, to date there has not been a brain-imaging investigation of so-called “cognitive empathy”, whereby one “actively projects oneself into the shoes of another person,” imagining someone's personal, emotional experience as if it were one's own. In order to investigate this process, we conducted a combined psychophysiology and PET and study in which participants imagined: (1) a personal experience of fear or anger from their own past; (2) an equivalent experience from another person as if it were happening to them; and (3) a nonemotional experience from their own past. When participants could relate to the scenario of the other, they produced patterns of psychophysiological and neuroimaging activation equivalent to those of personal emotional imagery, but when they could not relate to the other's story, differences emerged on all measures, e.g., decreased psychophysiological responses and recruitment of a region between the inferior temporal and fusiform gyri. The substrates of cognitive empathy overlap with those of personal feeling states to the extent that one can relate to the state and situation of the other.

Acknowledgements

This project was funded primarily by a grant from the Mathers Foundation; but funding was also received from NIH NINDS P01NS19632. Partial support to SP was also provided by a research grant from the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love and a fellowship from Eli Lilly and Company.

The authors would like to thank Emily Recknor for help with data collection and processing, Nasir Naqvi for help with psychophysiology data collection, Kathy Jones for help with subject recruitment and testing, Jocelyn Cole for processing the MR data, Joel Bruss for help with scan visualization, and the staff at the University of Iowa Department of Radiology for administration of the PET scans.