How Do We Empathize with Someone Who Is Not Like Us? A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study
How Do We Empathize with Someone Who Is Not Like Us? A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study
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DOI：
10.1162/jocn.2009.21186
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发表时间：
2010-02-01
影响因子：
3.2
通讯作者：
Decety, Jean
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Lamm, Claus;Meltzoff, Andrew N.;Decety, Jean
先前对移情的神经基础的研究仅限于观察者和目标个体以相似的方式经历的情感情境。在日常生活中，我们也会与那些对情感刺激的反应与我们截然不同的人互动。我们如何理解这些人的情感状态？我们使用功能性磁共振成像来评估参与者如何同情那些对外科手术没有疼痛反应但对轻柔触摸有疼痛反应的患者的感受。这些患者对疼痛的共情激活的区域（脑岛、内侧/前扣带皮层）与对疼痛刺激做出相同反应的人的共情激活的区域相同。当情境对观察者来说是厌恶的，而对病人来说是中性的时，共情涉及到自我-他人区分的区域（背内侧前额叶皮层）和认知控制（右下额叶皮层）。此外，后者与涉及情感处理的区域之间的有效连通性得到了增强。这表明，推断与我们不同的人的情感状态可以依赖于与我们相似的人的同理心相同的神经结构。当强烈的情绪反应倾向存在时，这些倾向必须通过执行功能来克服。我们的研究结果表明，额皮质注意网络在这一过程中起着至关重要的作用，证实了共情是一种灵活的现象，涉及自动和受控的认知机制。我们的研究结果对理解和促进共情具有重要意义，表明自我中心视角的调节对于理解他人至关重要。
Previous research on the neural underpinnings of empathy has been limited to affective situations experienced in a similar way by an observer and a target individual. In daily life we also interact with people whose responses to affective stimuli can be very different from our own. How do we understand the affective states of these individuals? We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess how participants empathize with the feelings of patients who reacted with no pain to surgical procedures but with pain to a soft touch. Empathy for pain of these patients activated the same areas (insula, medial/anterior cingulate cortex) as empathy for persons who responded to painful stimuli in the same way as the observer. Empathy in a situation that was aversive only for the observer but neutral for the patient recruited areas involved in self-other distinction (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex) and cognitive control (right inferior frontal cortex). In addition, effective connectivity between the latter and areas implicated in affective processing was enhanced. This suggests that inferring the affective state of someone who is not like us can rely upon the same neural structures as empathy for someone who is similar to us. When strong emotional response tendencies exist though, these tendencies have to be overcome by executive functions. Our results demonstrate that the fronto-cortical attention network is crucially involved in this process, corroborating that empathy is a flexible phenomenon which involves both automatic and controlled cognitive mechanisms. Our findings have important implications for the understanding and promotion of empathy, demonstrating that regulation of one's egocentric perspective is crucial for understanding others.