Dataset Information

I know how you feel: the warm-altruistic personality profile and the empathic brain.

ABSTRACT: The ability to empathize with other people is a critical component of human social relationships. Empathic processing varies across the human population, however it is currently unclear how personality traits are associated with empathic processing. This study was designed to test the hypothesis that specific personality traits are associated with behavioral and biological indicators of improved empathy. Extraversion and Agreeableness are personality traits designed to measure individual differences in social-cognitive functioning, however each trait-dimension includes elements that represent interpersonal social functioning and elements that do not represent interpersonal social functioning. We tested the prediction that interpersonal elements of Extraversion (Warmth) and Agreeableness (Altruism) are associated with empathy and non-interpersonal elements of Extraversion and Agreeableness are not associated with empathy. We quantified empathic processing behaviorally (empathic accuracy task using video vignettes) and within the brain (fMRI and an emotional perspective taking task) in 50 healthy subjects. Converging evidence shows that highly warm and altruistic people are well skilled in recognizing the emotional states of other people and exhibit greater activity in brain regions important for empathy (temporoparietal junction and medial prefrontal cortex) during emotional perspective taking. A mediation analysis further supported the association between warm-altruistic personality and empathic processing; indicating that one reason why highly warm-altruistic individuals may be skilled empathizers is that they engage the temporoparietal junction and medial prefrontal cortex more. Together, these findings advance the way the behavioral and neural basis of empathy is understood and demonstrates the efficacy of personality scales to measure individual differences in interpersonal social function.

SUBMITTER: Haas BW

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4359130 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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I know how you feel: the warm-altruistic personality profile and the empathic brain.

Haas Brian W BW Brook Michael M Remillard Laura L Ishak Alexandra A Anderson Ian W IW Filkowski Megan M MM

PloS one 20150313 3

The ability to empathize with other people is a critical component of human social relationships. Empathic processing varies across the human population, however it is currently unclear how personality traits are associated with empathic processing. This study was designed to test the hypothesis that specific personality traits are associated with behavioral and biological indicators of improved empathy. Extraversion and Agreeableness are personality traits designed to measure individual differe ...[more]

PMID: 25769028

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Project description:The cerebral correlates of altruistic decisions have increasingly attracted the interest of neuroscientists. To date, investigations on the neural underpinnings of altruistic decisions have primarily been conducted in healthy adults undergoing functional neuroimaging as they engaged in decisions to punish third parties. The chief purpose of the present study was to investigate altruistic decisions following focal brain damage with a novel altruistic decision task. In contrast to studies that have focused either on altruistic punishment or donation, the Altruistic Decision Task allows players to anonymously punish or donate to 30 charitable organizations involved with salient societal issues such as abortion, nuclear energy and civil rights. Ninety-four Vietnam War veterans with variable patterns of penetrating traumatic brain injury and 28 healthy veterans who also served in combat participated in the study as normal controls. Participants were asked to invest $1 to punish or reward real societal organizations, or keep the money for themselves. Associations between lesion distribution and performance on the task were analysed with multivariate support vector regression, which enables the assessment of the joint contribution of multiple regions in the determination of a given behaviour of interest. Our main findings were: (i) bilateral dorsomedial prefrontal lesions increased altruistic punishment, whereas lesions of the right perisylvian region and left temporo-insular cortex decreased punishment; (ii) altruistic donations were increased by bilateral lesions of the dorsomedial parietal cortex, whereas lesions of the right posterior superior temporal sulcus and middle temporal gyri decreased donations; (iii) altruistic punishment and donation were only weakly correlated, emphasizing their dissociable neuroanatomical associations; and (iv) altruistic decisions were not related to post-traumatic personality changes. These findings indicate that altruistic punishment and donation are determined by largely non-overlapping cerebral regions, which have previously been implicated in social cognition and moral experience such as evaluations of intentionality and intuitions of justice and morality.10.1093/brain/awy064_video1awy064media15758316955001.

Project description:Many empathy tasks lack ecological validity due to their use of simplistic stimuli and static analytical approaches. Empathic accuracy tasks overcome these limitations by using autobiographical emotional video clips. Usually, a single measure of empathic accuracy is computed by correlating the participants' continuous ratings of the narrator's emotional state with the narrator's own ratings. In this study, we validated a modified empathic accuracy task. A valence-independent rating of the narrator's emotional intensity was added to provide comparability between videos portraying different primary emotions and to explore changes in neural activity related to variations in emotional intensity over time. We also added a new neutral control condition to investigate general emotional processing. In the scanner, 34 healthy participants watched 6 video clips of people talking about an autobiographical event (2 sad, 2 happy and 2 neutral clips) while continuously rating the narrator's emotional intensity. Fluctuation in perceived emotional intensity correlated with activity in brain regions previously implicated in cognitive empathy (bilateral superior temporal sulcus, temporoparietal junction, and temporal pole) and affective empathy (right anterior insula and inferior frontal gyrus). When emotional video clips were compared to neutral video clips, we observed higher activity in similar brain regions. Empathic accuracy, on the other hand, was only positively related to activation in regions that have been implicated in cognitive empathy. Our modified empathic accuracy task provides a new method for studying the underlying components and dynamic processes involved in empathy. While the task elicited both cognitive and affective empathy, successful tracking of others' emotions relied predominantly on the cognitive components of empathy. The fMRI data analysis techniques developed here may prove valuable in characterising the neural basis of empathic difficulties observed across a range of psychiatric conditions.

Dataset Information

I know how you feel: the warm-altruistic personality profile and the empathic brain.

Publications

I know how you feel: the warm-altruistic personality profile and the empathic brain.

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