Department of Psychology, Division of Clinical Psychology and Epidemiology, University of Basel Basel, Switzerland ; Department of Psychiatry, University of California San Diego (UCSD) La Jolla, California, USA.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2013 May 9;7:177. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00177. eCollection 2013.
Empathy is key for healthy social functioning and individual differences in empathy have strong implications for manifold domains of social behavior. Empathy comprises of emotional and cognitive components and may also be closely linked to sensorimotor processes, which go along with the motivation and behavior to respond compassionately to another person's feelings. There is growing evidence for local plastic change in the structure of the healthy adult human brain in response to environmental demands or intrinsic factors. Here we have investigated changes in brain structure resulting from or predisposing to empathy. Structural MRI data of 101 healthy adult females was analyzed. Empathy in fictitious as well as real-life situations was assessed using a validated self-evaluation measure. Furthermore, empathy-related structural effects were also put into the context of a functional map of the anterior insular cortex (AIC) determined by activation likelihood estimate (ALE) meta-analysis of previous functional imaging studies. We found that gray matter (GM) density in the left dorsal AIC correlates with empathy and that this area overlaps with the domain general region (DGR) of the anterior insula that is situated in-between functional systems involved in emotion-cognition, pain, and motor tasks as determined by our meta-analysis. Thus, we propose that this insular region where we find structural differences depending on individual empathy may play a crucial role in modulating the efficiency of neural integration underlying emotional, cognitive, and sensorimotor information which is essential for global empathy.
同理心对于健康的社交功能至关重要，同理心的个体差异对社交行为的多个领域都有重要影响。同理心包括情感和认知成分，也可能与感觉运动过程密切相关，这些过程伴随着对他人感受做出同情回应的动机和行为。越来越多的证据表明，健康成年人的大脑结构会根据环境需求或内在因素发生局部的可塑性变化。在这里，我们研究了同理心产生或导致同理心的大脑结构变化。分析了 101 名健康成年女性的结构磁共振成像数据。使用经过验证的自我评估量表评估虚构和现实情境中的同理心。此外，同理心相关的结构效应也被纳入了我们之前通过激活似然估计 (ALE) 元分析确定的前岛叶功能图谱的背景中。我们发现，左背侧岛叶的灰质 (GM) 密度与同理心相关，而该区域与我们的元分析确定的前岛叶的一般区域 (DGR) 重叠，该区域位于涉及情绪-认知、疼痛和运动任务的功能系统之间。因此，我们提出，我们根据个体同理心发现结构差异的这个岛叶区域可能在调节情感、认知和感觉运动信息的神经整合效率方面发挥关键作用，而这对于整体同理心至关重要。
