Empathic brain responses in insula are modulated by levels of alexithymia but not autism

By G. Bird, Giorgia Silani, R. Brindley, Sarah J White, Uta Frith, Tania Singer. Brain : a journal of neurology, 2010

646 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Difficulties in social cognition are well recognized in individuals with autism spectrum conditions (henceforth ‘autism’). Here we focus on one crucial aspect of social cognition: the ability to empathize with the feelings of another. In contrast to theory of mind, a capacity that has often been observed to be impaired in individuals with autism, much less is known about the capacity of individuals with autism for affect sharing. Based on previous data suggesting that empathy deficits in autism are a function of interoceptive deficits related to alexithymia, we aimed to investigate empathic brain responses in autistic and control participants with high and low degrees of alexithymia. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we measured empathic brain responses with an ‘empathy for pain’ paradigm assessing empathic brain responses in a real-life social setting that does not rely on attention to, or recognition of, facial affect cues. Confirming previous findings, empathic brain responses to the suffering of others were associated with increased activation in left anterior insula and the strength of this signal was predictive of the degree of alexithymia in both autistic and control groups but did not vary as a function of group. Importantly, there was no difference in the degree of empathy between autistic and control groups after accounting for alexithymia. These findings suggest that empathy deficits observed in autism may be due to the large comorbidity between alexithymic traits and autism, rather than representing a necessary feature of the social impairments in autism.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychiatry and Mental health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b20db0a66beece5668b235078ae8de7b2d0da11c

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Citations in the corpus

The neural basis of empathy. (2012, background): “…alterations in networks underlying empathy and social cognition in general can also be gained from investigating clinical and subclinical groups associated with deficient empathic ability, such as individuals with conduct disorder, ASD, and alexithymia (Bird et al. 2010, Silani et al. 2008).”
What Is It like to Feel Another’s Pain?* (2012, background): “Furthermore, it has been reported that seeing someone being hurt does not activate the pain matrix in patients with alexithymia (i.e., those who do not report any emotion; Bird et al. 2010).”
Precise minds in uncertain worlds: predictive coding in autism. (2014, background): “Brain responses related to empathy are also modulated by alexithymia rather than ASD (Bird et al., 2010).”
Reintegrating the Study of Accuracy Into Social Cognition Research (2011, background): “For example, not all studies of ASD document problems in mind perception tasks or their neural bases (Bird et al., 2010; Bowler, 1992; Castelli, 2005; Fan, Decety, Yang, Liu, & Cheng, 2010).”
Neural responses to ingroup and outgroup members' suffering predict individual differences in costly helping. (2010, neutral): “Furthermore, several recent studies have focused on identifying factors that modulate these empathy-related brain responses (Bird et al., 2009; Cheng et al., 2007; Lamm et al., 2007a; Singer et al., 2006).”
Anterior Insular Cortex and Emotional Awareness (2013, neutral): “Although much research has focused on the modulatory effect of one mental process on another (Ochsner and Gross, 2005; Blair et al., 2007), fMRI evidence supporting functional integration is limited.”