Spontaneous versus deliberate vicarious representations: different routes to empathy in psychopathy and autism
Year: 2014
Type: letter
Abstract: Sir, We read the article recently published by Meffert et al. (2013) with great interest. The authors used functional MRI to investigate vicarious emotional representation in psychopathic offenders, scanning 18 psychopaths and 26 non-offending control subjects. Participants were either presented with video clips of short emotional interactions or experienced similar interactions themselves. Results showed that although psychopaths showed normal patterns of neural activation in response to experience, abnormal patterns of activation were observed during observation of others’ interactions in those regions known to be involved in vicarious emotional experience. However, when participants were instructed to ‘feel with the hands in the videos’ differences in activation between psychopaths and control subjects were significantly reduced in numerous regions of interest, including the medial and anterior left insula, left anterior cingulate cortex, and bilateral angular gyri (Meffert et al., 2013). The authors conclude that these results point toward reduced spontaneous but intact deliberate vicarious representations in psychopathy.
Source: Brain
DOI: 10.1093/brain/awt364
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2142680474