Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL, Alexandra House, 17 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AZ, UK.
Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, UCL, 12 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3BG, UK.
Sci Rep. 2017 Mar 3;7:43316. doi: 10.1038/srep43316.
Empathy is a key component of our ability to engage and interact with others. In recent years, the neural mechanisms underlying affective and cognitive empathy have garnered intense interest. This work demonstrates that empathy for others depends upon a distributed network of regions such as the insula, parietal cortex, and somatosensory areas, which are also activated when we ourselves experience an empathized-with emotion (e.g., pain). Individuals vary markedly in their ability to empathize with others, which predicts the tendency to help others and relates to individual differences in the neuroanatomy of these areas. Here, we use a newly developed, high-resolution (800 μm isotropic), quantitative MRI technique to better elucidate the neuroanatomical underpinnings of individual differences in empathy. Our findings extend previous studies of the neuroanatomical correlates of cognitive and affective empathy. In particular, individual differences in cognitive empathy were associated with markers of myeloarchitectural integrity of the insular cortex, while affective empathy was predicted by a marker of iron content in second somatosensory cortex. These results indicate potential novel biomarkers of trait empathy, suggesting that microstructural features of an empathy and body-related network are crucial for understanding the mental and emotional states of others.
同理心是我们与他人互动和交往的关键能力之一。近年来，情感和认知同理心的神经机制引起了极大的兴趣。这项工作表明，对他人的同理心取决于一个分布式的区域网络，如脑岛、顶叶皮层和躯体感觉区域，当我们自己体验到被同理心的情绪（例如，疼痛）时，这些区域也会被激活。个体在同理心他人的能力上存在显著差异，这预测了帮助他人的倾向，并与这些区域的神经解剖结构的个体差异有关。在这里，我们使用一种新开发的、高分辨率（800μm 各向同性）、定量 MRI 技术，更好地阐明同理心个体差异的神经解剖基础。我们的发现扩展了先前对认知和情感同理心的神经解剖学相关性的研究。具体来说，认知同理心的个体差异与脑岛髓鞘结构完整性的标志物有关，而情感同理心则与第二躯体感觉皮层铁含量的标志物有关。这些结果表明了特质同理心的潜在新型生物标志物，表明同理心和与身体相关的网络的微观结构特征对于理解他人的心理和情绪状态至关重要。
