Up-regulation of neural indicators of empathic concern in an offender population

Abstract

Empathic concern has traditionally been conceived of as a spontaneous reaction to others experiencing pain or distress. As such, the potential role of more deliberate control over empathic responses has frequently been overlooked. The present fMRI study evaluated the role of such deliberate control in empathic concern by examining the extent to which a sample of offenders recruited through probation/parole could voluntarily modulate their neural activity to another person in pain. Offenders were asked to either passively view pictures of other people in painful or non-painful situations, or to actively modulate their level of concern for the person in pain. During passive viewing of painful versus non-painful pictures, offenders showed minimal neural activity in regions previously linked to empathy for pain (e.g., dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and bilateral insula). However, when instructed to try to increase their concern for the person in pain, offenders demonstrated significant increases within these regions. These findings are consistent with recent theories of empathy as motivational in nature, and suggest that limitations in empathic concern may include a motivational component.

Capacity for upregulation of emotional processing in psychopathy: all you have to do is ask

“…While replicating the extant literature, which has long established the psychopaths’ hyporesponsivity to aversive stimuli (Lykken, 1957 , 1995 ; Fowles, 1980 ; Blair, 2005 ; Patrick, 2007 ), these findings also dovetail with recent work from our laboratory (Arbuckle and Shane, 2017 ) and others (Meffert et al ., 2013 ) that has shown an ability for high-psychopathy individuals to deliberately manifest vicarious responses for others. Incapacity models of psychopathy should hypothesize an inability to undertake such deliberate upregulation of emotion, given that the psychopath is deemed to have broadly decreased access to, and experience from, their emotional system.…”

“…Whereas Meffert et al . (2013) and Arbuckle and Shane (2017) focused on the ability to deliberately increase one’s consideration for another’s experiences, the present study asked participants to increase their ‘own’ naturally occurring emotional reactions to a wide variety of negatively valent pictures. This minor methodological change may have at least three important implications.…”

“…Contemporary neuroimaging work has also reported evidence of underlying abnormalities in brain regions believed involved in emotion-related processing, including insula (Birbaumer et al ., 2005 ; Decety et al ., 2013a , b ; Meffert et al ., 2013 ; Arbuckle and Shane, 2017 ; Seara-Cardoso et al ., 2016 ), amygdala (Yang et al ., 2009 ; Ermer et al ., 2013 ; Cope et al ., 2014 ; Seara-Cardoso et al ., 2016 , but see Müller et al ., 2003 ; Schultz et al ., 2016 ) and orbitofrontal/ventromedial prefrontal cortex (Soderstrom et al ., 2002 ; Ermer et al ., 2013 ; Decety et al ., 2014 ; Harenski et al ., 2014 ). Together these regions form a frontolimbic circuit believed to underlie the detection, interpretation and management of emotional processing (Lindquist et al ., 2015 ).…”

“…For instance, it may be that psychopathic individuals focus less on emotionally relevant stimuli than non-psychopathic individuals (see relevant work by Newman and colleagues; e.g. Wallace et al ., 1999 ; Newman and Baskin-Sommers, 2016 ) or are simply less motivated to manifest an emotional response (Shane and Peterson, 2004 ; Arbuckle and Shane, 2017 ). One of the reasons that these distinctions have been difficult to make is because the majority of previous work has tested psychopaths’ emotional processing within what we refer to here as ‘passive-processing’ conditions: conditions within which participants’ naturally occurring reactions are recorded while they serve only as passive recipients of presented stimuli.…”

“…More recent works by Meffert et al . ( 2013 ) and Arbuckle and Shane ( 2017 ) have utilized MRI to evaluate participants’ neural responses while trying to maximize or minimize their empathy for people in pain. Specifically, participants were asked to either watch the pictures as they normally would (a passive-processing condition) or to try to increase (or decrease) their level of concern for the people in pain (an instructed-processing condition).…”