Perspective taking associated with social relationships: a NIRS study.

Social neuroscience has made considerable progress in revealing the mechanisms underlying empathy. We focused on the mechanism of perspective taking, which is one aspect of the empathic process that includes the emotional inhibitory mechanism, a function of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex using the near-infrared spectroscopy. As a pretreatment, 19 participants played a game with confederates playing either fairly or unfairly. Accordingly, each participant evaluated valence of their partner's faces. The data showed that taking the other perspective of an unfair player activated the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex in participants with high PT ability. In contrast, the behavioral data showed no differences between those participants with high and low-perspective taking abilities. These results suggest that different types of empathic features can produce different perspective taking strategies.