Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, Department of Psychology and Psychiatry, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.
Dev Sci. 2010 Nov;13(6):886-99. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00940.x.
Empathy and sympathy play crucial roles in much of human social interaction and are necessary components for healthy coexistence. Sympathy is thought to be a proxy for motivating prosocial behavior and providing the affective and motivational base for moral development. The purpose of the present study was to use functional MRI to characterize developmental changes in brain activation in the neural circuits underpinning empathy and sympathy. Fifty-seven individuals, whose age ranged from 7 to 40 years old, were presented with short animated visual stimuli depicting painful and non-painful situations. These situations involved either a person whose pain was accidentally caused or a person whose pain was intentionally inflicted by another individual to elicit empathic (feeling as the other) or sympathetic (feeling concern for the other) emotions, respectively. Results demonstrate monotonic age-related changes in the amygdala, supplementary motor area, and posterior insula when participants were exposed to painful situations that were accidentally caused. When participants observed painful situations intentionally inflicted by another individual, age-related changes were detected in the dorsolateral prefrontal and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, with a gradual shift in that latter region from its medial to its lateral portion. This pattern of activation reflects a change from a visceral emotional response critical for the analysis of the affective significance of stimuli to a more evaluative function. Further, these data provide evidence for partially distinct neural mechanisms subserving empathy and sympathy, and demonstrate the usefulness of a developmental neurobiological approach to the new emerging area of moral neuroscience.
同理心和同情心在人类的社会互动中起着至关重要的作用，是健康共存的必要组成部分。人们认为同情心是激发亲社会行为的一种替代方式，为道德发展提供了情感和动机基础。本研究的目的是使用功能磁共振成像来描述同理心和同情心所依赖的神经回路的大脑激活的发展变化。共有 57 名年龄在 7 岁至 40 岁之间的个体接受了短的动画视觉刺激，这些刺激描绘了痛苦和非痛苦的情况。这些情况分别涉及到一个人的痛苦是意外造成的，或者一个人的痛苦是被另一个人故意施加的，以引起共情（感受他人）或同情（关心他人）的情绪。结果表明，当参与者接触到意外造成的痛苦情况时，杏仁核、辅助运动区和后岛叶的年龄相关变化呈单调递增。当参与者观察到另一个人故意施加的痛苦情况时，在背外侧前额叶和腹内侧前额叶皮层中检测到与年龄相关的变化，而后者区域从内侧逐渐转移到外侧。这种激活模式反映了从对刺激的情感意义进行分析的内脏情绪反应到更具评价性的功能的转变。此外，这些数据为同理心和同情心的部分不同神经机制提供了证据，并证明了发展神经生物学方法对新兴的道德神经科学领域的有用性。
