Empathy is the ability to understand and share other people’s emotions. Researchers have debated whether Westerners and Asians differ in their self-report empathy. This study aimed to replicate a previously reported culture–sex interaction in self-report empathy using Australian and Mainland Chinese participants, to investigate the cultural differences in self-report empathy in each sex group, and to verify the moderated mediating effects of three empathy-related traits (i.e., independent self-construal, interdependent self-construal, and personal distress) on the cultural differences in self-report empathy in both sex groups. In this study, scores on two self-report questionnaires of empathy, namely, the Empathy Quotient (EQ) and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), were compared between 196 Australian Caucasian (101 males) and 211 Mainland Chinese (59 males) university students. Results first confirmed the significant culture–sex interaction and illustrated that the cultural differences in empathy scores were significant only for female (i.e., Australian females had higher scores than Mainland Chinese females) but not for male participants. Furthermore, results of moderated mediation analyses indicated that higher self-report empathy in both females and males was related to higher interdependent self-construal (exhibited by Mainland Chinese) and less personal distress (exhibited by Australians), and particularly in females, also related to higher independent self-construal (exhibited by Australian females). The current study is one of few studies that suggest cultural differences in empathy are dependent on the sex of the participant. Moreover, the current findings have added new insights into the explanation of cultural differences in empathy using personal distress and self-construal.

Our findings from both sMRI and fMRI meta-analyses further support the conceptualization of NSS as a manifestation of the "cerebello-thalamo-prefrontal" brain network model of schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders.

BackgroundRecent studies suggest that anhedonia, an inability to experience pleasure, can be measured as an enduring trait in non-clinical samples. In order to examine trait anhedonia in a non-clinical sample, we examined the properties of a range of widely used questionnaires capturing anhedonia.Methods887 young adults were recruited from colleges. All of them were administered a set of checklists, including Chapman Scale for Social Anhedonia (CRSAS) and the Chapman Scale for Physical Anhedonia Scale (CPAS), The Temporal Experience of Pleasure Scale(TEPS), and The Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ).ResultsMales showed significantly higher level of physical (F = 5.09, p<0.001) and social (F = 4.38, p<0.005) anhedonia than females. As expected, individuals with schizotypal personality features also demonstrated significantly higher scores of physical (t = 3.81, p<0.001) and social (t = 7.33, p<0.001) trait anhedonia than individuals without SPD features, but no difference on self-report anticipatory and consummatory pleasure experience.ConclusionsConcerning the comparison on each item of physical and social anhedonia, the results indicated that individuals with SPD feature exhibited higher than individuals without SPD features on more items of social anhedonia than physical anhedonia scale. These preliminary findings suggested that trait anhedonia can be identified a non-clinical sample. Exploring the demographic and clinical correlates of trait anhedonia in the general population may provide clues to the pathogenesis of psychotic disorder.

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Anticipatory and consummatory dissociation of hedonic experience may manifest as anhedonia in schizophrenia. However, it is unclear if this temporal dissociation of pleasure experience is also relevant in other symptoms like social anhedonia in the schizophrenia disorder spectrum. The present study applied two incentive delay tasks involving different incentive types (money vs. social affective images) to a sample of 28 participants with elevated social anhedonia (SocAnh) and 38 healthy controls from a population of 476 college students. The results showed that the SocAnh group had comparable anticipatory sensitivity and consummatory pleasure towards monetary incentives as the controls; but they exhibited significant decrease in both anticipatory sensitivity and consummatory experience to positive social affective images. These findings demonstrate the presence of a domain-specific deficit in people with social anhedonia towards social affective information, and suggest that incentive types could confound the findings on the dissociation of anticipatory vs. consummatory hedonic capacities.

BackgroundThe current study explored the prevalence of depressed mood among Chinese undergraduate students and examined the coping patterns and degree of flexibility of flexibility of such patterns associated with such mood.MethodsA set of questionnaire assessing coping patterns, coping flexibility, and depressive symptoms were administered to 428 students (234 men and 194 women).ResultsA total of 266 participants both completed the entire set of questionnaires and reported a frequency of two or more stressful life events (the criterion needed to calculate variance in perceived controllability). Findings showed that higher levels of depressive symptoms were significantly associated with higher levels of both event frequency (r = .368, p < .001) and event impact (r = .245, p < .001) and lower levels of perceived controllability (r = -.261, p < .001), coping effectiveness (r = -.375, p < .001), and ratio of strategy to situation fit (r = -.108, p < .05). Depressive symptoms were not significantly associated with cognitive flexibility (variance of perceived controllability; r = .031, p = .527), Gender was not a significant moderator of any of the reported associations.ConclusionsFindings indicate that Chinese university students with depressive symptoms reported experiencing a greater number of negative events than did non-depressed university students. In addition, undergraduates with depressive symptoms were more likely than other undergraduates to utilize maladaptive coping methods. Such findings highlight the potential importance of interventions aimed at helping undergraduate students with a lower coping flexibility develop skills to cope with stressful life events.

The results suggest that the AID and the MID tasks have unique activation patterns. Our findings also suggest that the AID task may be more sensitive in detecting anhedonia in people with trait anhedonia.

The current study sought to examine the underlying brain changes in individuals with high schizotypy by integrating networks derived from brain structural and functional imaging. Individuals with high schizotypy (n = 35) and low schizotypy (n = 34) controls were screened using the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire and underwent brain structural and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging on a 3T scanner. Voxel-based morphometric analysis and graph theory-based functional network analysis were conducted. Individuals with high schizotypy showed reduced gray matter (GM) density in the insula and the dorsolateral prefrontal gyrus. The graph theoretical analysis showed that individuals with high schizotypy showed similar global properties in their functional networks as low schizotypy individuals. Several hubs of the functional network were identified in both groups, including the insula, the lingual gyrus, the postcentral gyrus, and the rolandic operculum. More hubs in the frontal lobe and fewer hubs in the occipital lobe were identified in individuals with high schizotypy. By comparing the functional connectivity between clusters with abnormal GM density and the whole brain, individuals with high schizotypy showed weaker functional connectivity between the left insula and the putamen, but stronger connectivity between the cerebellum and the medial frontal gyrus. Taken together, our findings suggest that individuals with high schizotypy present changes in terms of GM and resting-state functional connectivity, especially in the frontal lobe.