Empathy and frontal lobe

BACKGROUND: The frontal variant of Alzheimer's disease (fAD) is poorly understood and poorly defined. The diagnosis remains challenging. The main differential diagnosis is the behavioral variant of frontotemporal degeneration (bvFTD). For fAD, there is some dissociation between the clinical frontal presentation and imaging and neuropathological studies, which do not always find a specific involvement of the frontal lobes. DAPHNE is a behavioral scale, which demonstrated excellent performance to distinguish between bvFTD and AD...

(1) Background: The uncinate fasciculus (UF) is a white matter bundle connecting the prefrontal cortex and temporal lobe. The functional role of the uncinate fasciculus is still uncertain. The role of the UF is attributed to the emotional empathy network. The present study aimed to more accurately the describe anatomical variability of the UF by focusing on the volume of fibers and testing for correlations with sex and age. (2) Material and Methods: Magnetic resonance imaging of adult patients with diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) was performed on 34 patients...

The concept of the right temporal variant of frontotemporal dementia (rtvFTD) is still equivocal. The syndrome accompanying predominant right anterior temporal atrophy has previously been described as memory loss, prosopagnosia, getting lost and behavioural changes. Accurate detection is challenging, as the clinical syndrome might be confused with either behavioural variant FTD (bvFTD) or Alzheimer's disease. Furthermore, based on neuroimaging features, the syndrome has been considered a right-sided variant of semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA)...

BACKGROUND: Pregnancy constitutes a significant period in the lives of women, after which they often experience numerous crucial physiological and psychological changes. Functional neuroimaging studies have shown longitudinal changes in functional brain activity in mothers responding to infant-related stimuli. However, the structural changes that occur in the brains of mothers after delivery remain to be explored. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to evaluate the structural changes in mothers during the postpartum phase...

Humans are highly social animals whose survival and well-being depend on their capacity to cooperate in complex social settings. Advances in anthropology and psychology have demonstrated the importance of cooperation for enhancing social cohesion and minimizing conflict. The understanding of social behavior is informed by the notion of social cognition, a set of mental operations including emotion perception, mentalizing, and empathy. The social brain hypothesis posits that the mammalian brain has enlarged over evolution to meet the challenges of social life, culminating in a large human brain well adapted for social cognition...

Impairments of social behavior constitute common symptoms of frontal lobe dysfunction and are frequent consequences of damage to the frontal lobe. In this chapter we define and describe social behavioral deficits that include mentalizing (e.g., theory of mind, empathy), social self-regulation, social self-awareness, and social problem solving, and discuss how intervention research might address these deficits. Three stages of neurologic illness are emphasized: the early recovery stage after frontal lobe damage, chronic recovery phases of recovery from frontal lobe damage, and progressive decline from frontal neurodegenerative disease...

The frontal lobes play an integral role in human socioemotional and cognitive function. Sense of self, moral decisions, empathy, and behavioral monitoring of goal-states all depend on key nodes within frontal cortex. While several neurodegenerative diseases can affect frontal function, frontotemporal dementia (FTD) has particularly serious and specific effects, which thus provide insights into the role of frontal circuits in homeostasis and adaptive behavior. FTD represents a collection of disorders with specific clinical-pathologic correlates, imaging, and genetics...

Empathy is an essential component of our social lives, allowing us to understand and share other people's affective and sensory states, including pain. Evidence suggests a core neural network-including anterior insula (AI) and mid-cingulate cortex (MCC)-is involved in empathy for pain. However, a similar network is associated to empathy for non-pain affective states, raising the question whether empathy for pain is unique in its neural correlates. Furthermore, it is yet unclear whether neural correlates converge across different stimuli and paradigms that evoke pain-empathy...

Empathy is a mental ability that allows one person to understand the mental and emotional state of another and determines how to effectively respond to that person. When a person receives cues that another person is in pain, neural pain circuits within the brain are activated. Studies have shown that compared with non-medical staff, medical practitioners present lower empathy for pain in medical scenarios, but the mechanism of this phenomenon remains in dispute. This work investigates whether the neural correlates of empathic processes of pain are altered by professional medical knowledge...

Hidden beneath the Sylvian fissure and sometimes considered as the fifth lobe of the brain, the insula plays a multi-modal role from its strategic location. Previous structural studies have reported cortico-cortical connections with the frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital lobes, but only a few have looked at its connections with subcortical structures. The insular cortex plays a role in a wide range of functions including processing of visceral and somatosensory inputs, olfaction, audition, language, motivation, craving, addiction and emotions such as pain, empathy and disgust...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVE: Rehabilitation focuses brain-behavior relationship which highlights interaction between psychological and neurobiological factors for better patient care. There is a missing link in the literature about socio-cognitive aspects of frontal lobe epilepsy. Our objective was to examine prefrontal cortical functioning (PCF) and empathic abilities in patients with frontal lobe epilepsy (FLE). Further, we analyzed whether any relationship between components of dispositional empathy and PCF exists in patients with FLE...

Although the mirror neuron system (MNS) has been extensively studied in monkeys and adult humans, very little is known about its development. Previous studies suggest that the MNS is present by infancy and that the brain and MNS-related cognitive abilities (such as language, empathy, and imitation learning) continue to develop after childhood. In humans, the PFt area of the inferior parietal lobule (IPL) seems to particularly correlate with the functional properties of the PF area in primates, which contains mirror neurons...

Affect sharing and prosocial motivation are integral parts of empathy that are conceptually and mechanistically distinct. We used a neurodegenerative disease (NDG) lesion model to examine the neural correlates of these two aspects of real-world empathic responding. The study enrolled 275 participants, including 44 healthy older controls and 231 patients diagnosed with one of five neurodegenerative diseases (75 Alzheimer's disease, 58 behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), 42 semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA), 28 progressive supranuclear palsy, and 28 non-fluent variant primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA)...

Individuals with psychopathy present deficits in the recognition of facial emotional expressions. However, the nature and extent of these alterations are not fully understood. Furthermore, available data on the functional neural correlates of emotional face recognition deficits in adult psychopaths have provided mixed results. In this context, emotional face morphing tasks may be suitable for clarifying mild and emotion-specific impairments in psychopaths. Likewise, studies exploring corresponding anatomical correlates may be useful for disentangling available neurofunctional evidence based on the alleged neurodevelopmental roots of psychopathic traits...

In this paper, I start by suggesting a new definition of empathy. I go on by answering the question of "Who feels empathy?". I list some examples of people, illustrating how the level of feeling empathy differs from one category of people to another. It's actually almost everybody who feels empathy: the baby, the good Samaritan and the other two priests, the tax evader, the psychopath, the judges, juries, lawyers, the politician, the bully adolescent, the therapist, etc.… Then I explain, "Why empathy is experienced/felt differently?", by drawing on some neuroscience data, and some literature in psychology or philosophy along with some personal suggestions or assumptions...

BACKGROUND: Patients with epilepsy frequently experience cognitive impairments, including impairments in social cognition. However, there is a lack of direct examinations of the affective and cognitive aspects of social cognition in such patients. The neural correlates remain to be identified. The present study was designed to examine the degree of impairments in different aspects of social cognition including empathy, emotion recognition, and Theory of Mind (ToM) in patients with epilepsy...

Refractory mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE) is the most frequent focal epilepsy and is often accompanied by deficits in social cognition including emotion recognition, theory of mind, and empathy. Consistent with the neuronal networks that are crucial for normal social-cognitive processing, these impairments have been associated with functional changes in fronto-temporal regions. However, although atrophy in unilateral MTLE also affects regions of the temporal and frontal lobes that underlie social cognition, little is known about the structural correlates of social-cognitive deficits in refractory MTLE...

BACKGROUND AND AIM: Despite an extensive literature on cognitive impairments in focal and generalized epilepsy, only a few number of studies specifically explored social cognition disorders in epilepsy syndromes. The aim of our study was to investigate social cognition abilities in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) and in patients with idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE). MATERIALS AND METHODS: Thirty-nine patients (21 patients with TLE and 18 patients with IGE) and 21 matched healthy controls (HCs) were recruited...

The aim of this study is to evaluate the empathic ability and its functional brain correlates in post-traumatic stress disorder subjects (PTSD). Seven PTSD subjects and ten healthy controls, all present in the L'Aquila area during the earthquake of the April 2009, underwent fMRI during which they performed a modified version of the Multifaceted Empathy Test. PTSD patients showed impairments in implicit and explicit emotional empathy, but not in cognitive empathy. Brain responses during cognitive empathy showed an increased activation in patients compared to controls in the right medial frontal gyrus and the left inferior frontal gyrus...

Models on how perceptual and cognitive information on others' mental states are treated by the cognitive architecture are often framed as duplex models considering two independent systems. In the context of the neuroscience of empathy analogous systems have been described. Using event-related potentials (i.e., ERPs) technique, we tested the hypothesis of temporal dissociation of two functional systems. We implemented a design in which perceptual (i.e., painful or neutral facial expressions) and contextual (i...