Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, 20057, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA.
Sci Rep. 2019 Jul 24;9(1):10774. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-47196-3.
Empathy-affective resonance with others' sensory or emotional experiences-is hypothesized to be an important precursor to altruism. However, it is not known whether real-world altruists' heightened empathy reflects true self-other mapping of multi-voxel neural response patterns. We investigated this relationship in adults who had engaged in extraordinarily costly real-world altruism: donating a kidney to a stranger. Altruists and controls completed fMRI testing while anticipating and experiencing pain, and watching as a stranger anticipated and experienced pain. Machine learning classifiers tested for shared representation between experienced and observed distress. Altruists exhibited more similar representations of experienced and observed fearful anticipation spontaneously and following an empathy prompt in anterior insula and anterior/middle cingulate cortex, respectively, suggesting heightened empathic proclivities and abilities for fear. During pain epochs, altruists were distinguished by spontaneous empathic responses in anterior insula, anterior/mid-cingulate cortex and supplementary motor area, but showed no difference from controls after the empathy prompt. These findings (1) link shared multi-voxel representations of the distress of self and others to real-world costly altruism, (2) reinforce distinctions between empathy for sensory states like pain and anticipatory affective states like fear, and (3) highlight the importance of differentiating between the proclivity and ability to empathize.
与他人的感官或情感体验产生共鸣——同理心——被假设为利他主义的重要前兆。然而，目前尚不清楚现实世界中的利他主义者增强的同理心是否反映了多体素神经反应模式的真正自我与他人的映射。我们在进行了非凡的现实世界利他主义行为的成年人中研究了这种关系：向陌生人捐献肾脏。利他主义者和对照组在预期和体验疼痛时以及在观察陌生人预期和体验疼痛时完成 fMRI 测试。机器学习分类器测试了经历和观察到的痛苦之间的共享表示。利他主义者在前脑岛和前/中扣带皮层中自发地表现出更相似的经历和观察到的恐惧预期的表示，分别提示出更高的同理心倾向和对恐惧的能力。在疼痛阶段，利他主义者在前脑岛、前/中扣带皮层和辅助运动区表现出自发的同理心反应，但在同理心提示后与对照组没有区别。这些发现：1）将自我和他人痛苦的共享多体素表示与现实世界中的利他主义联系起来；2）强化了对疼痛等感官状态和恐惧等预期情感状态的同理心之间的区别；3）强调了区分同理心倾向和能力的重要性。
