1 Departments of Neurology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Meyer 6-113, Johns Hopkins Hospital 600 N. Wolfe Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21287, USA.
Brain. 2014 Apr;137(Pt 4):981-97. doi: 10.1093/brain/awt317. Epub 2013 Nov 30.
Emotional empathy--the ability to recognize, share in, and make inferences about another person's emotional state--is critical for all social interactions. The neural mechanisms underlying emotional empathy have been widely studied with functional imaging of healthy participants. However, functional imaging studies reveal correlations between areas of activation and performance of a task, so that they can only reveal areas engaged in a task, rather than areas of the brain that are critical for the task. Lesion studies complement functional imaging, to identify areas necessary for a task. Impairments in emotional empathy have been mostly studied in neurological diseases with fairly diffuse injury, such as traumatic brain injury, autism and dementia. The classic 'focal lesion' is stroke. There have been scattered studies of patients with impaired empathy after stroke and other focal injury, but these studies have included small numbers of patients. This review will bring together data from these studies, to complement evidence from functional imaging. Here I review how focal lesions affect emotional empathy. I will show how lesion studies contribute to the understanding of the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying emotional empathy, and how they contribute to the management of patients with impaired emotional empathy.
情感共情——即识别、分享和推断他人情绪状态的能力——对所有社交互动都至关重要。健康参与者的功能成像已广泛研究了情感共情的神经机制。然而，功能成像研究揭示了激活区域与任务表现之间的相关性，因此它们只能揭示参与任务的区域，而不是对任务至关重要的大脑区域。病变研究补充了功能成像，以确定完成任务所需的区域。情感共情障碍在具有相当弥散性损伤的神经疾病中得到了广泛研究，例如创伤性脑损伤、自闭症和痴呆症。经典的“局灶性病变”是中风。中风后和其他局灶性损伤患者共情受损的散在研究，但这些研究纳入的患者数量较少。这篇综述将汇集这些研究的数据，以补充功能成像的证据。在这里，我将回顾局灶性病变如何影响情感共情。我将展示病变研究如何有助于理解情感共情的认知和神经机制，并有助于管理情感共情受损的患者。
