TY - JOUR
T1 - Tracking emotions in the brain
T2 - Revisiting the Empathic Accuracy Task
AU - Mackes, Nuria K.
AU - Golm, Dennis
AU - O'Daly, Owen G.
AU - Sarkar, Sagari
AU - Sonuga-Barke, Edmund J.S.
AU - Fairchild, Graeme
AU - Mehta, Mitul A.
N1 - Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
PY - 2018/9/1
Y1 - 2018/9/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Ecological validity
KW - Emotion
KW - Empathy
KW - fMRI
KW - Social cognition
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85048306409&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.05.080
DO - 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.05.080
M3 - Article
C2 - 29890323
AN - SCOPUS:85048306409
SN - 1053-8119
VL - 178
SP - 677
EP - 686
JO - NeuroImage
JF - NeuroImage
IS - 0
ER -