2007 — 2013 |
Cacioppo, John (co-PI) [⬀] Decety, Jean |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Cognitive Neuroscience of Empathy
Empathy refers to the capacity to understand and respond to the unique affective experiences of another person. Knowledge of empathic behavior is essential for an understanding of human social and moral development. Current trends in empathy theory suggest that empathy involves two inter-related primary components: (a) an automatic affective response to another person, which often entails sharing that person?s emotional state; and (b) a cognitive capacity to take the perspective of the other person. Furthermore, these two components are experienced without confusing the self with the other. The basic mechanism for empathy rests on the ability to recognize that the self and other are similar, but also on an ability to differentiate between the two. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Jean Decety and colleagues at the University of Chicago will address the psychological and neural mechanisms involved in the experience of empathy by combining the approaches of cognitive neuroscience and social psychology. Neural activity during the experience of empathy will be compared across various situational and dispositional factors which are well documented in social psychology. Brain imaging (functional magnetic resonance imaging) will be used to measure the effects of stigma, racial bias, similarity and past shared experiences between self and others on the automatic resonance between self and other. There will be a special emphasis on the case of perception of pain, which has proven to be fairly universal and also typical of other processes. In all studies dispositional measures of individual differences in emotion contagion, empathy, sensitivity to pain, will be collected to allow for a fuller explication of the brain results.
This work will yield a better understanding of the cognitive and neurophysiological mechanisms involved in empathy and sympathy as well as several factors, seemingly unique to human kind, that influence or modulate our ability to share feelings and care for others. Both the findings and the techniques will be of value to clinicians as well as other researchers. This work will also contribute to teaching and training of students, especially interdisciplinary training between neuroscience and social psychology. Some of the proposed research will investigate the impact of racial group membership on the neural networks that mediate empathy and work on racial stereotypes and racial information processing has been an area of interest to undergraduate and graduate students from underrepresented minority groups. Thus this work may increase the attractiveness of neuroscience for students from these groups.
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2009 — 2012 |
Decety, Jean |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience of Atypical Empathy in Conduct Disorder
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed study will comparatively evaluate three hypotheses regarding biopsychological mechanisms underpinning atypical empathy in conduct disorder (CD). Significance: Antisocial behavior across the lifespan creates an enormous public health burden. Despite the indisputable importance of social factors, much remains to be learned about neurobiological factors involved in childhood CD. Empathic concern for others has been hypothesized to play a key role in inhibiting aggression and other forms of antisocial behavior and deficits in empathy lead to profound disturbances in social interaction. Therefore, studies of the role of atypical empathic concern in childhood CD are of great importance. Innovation: The proposed study would be the first neurobiological study of atypical empathy in pre-adolescent children with CD using functional magnetic resonance imaging. It will provide the empirical basis for a much-needed integrative biopsychological model of the basic brain-behavior processes involved in dysfunctional empathy in CD. Multiple levels of scientific analysis are fundamentally important when addressing complex phenomena such as CD. Too often, the assessment of empathy in both healthy and psychiatric populations has relied solely on self-report measures that provide only one kind of information. Approach: To achieve our scientific aims we will obtain from male and female 9-11 year old children who meet diagnostic criteria for CD (N = 60) and a group of non-CD control children (N = 60) a number of neurobiological and behavioral measures of responses to viewing others in pain. These measures include: (a) structural brain anatomy and functional connectivity (b) neuro-hemodynamic responses to visual stimuli that typically evoke empathic concern, (c) subjective ratings of the affect elicited by viewing others in pain, (d) behavioral measures of approach tendencies to stimuli depicting pain in others, and (e) measures of autonomic nervous system activity. We hypothesize that when viewing others in pain, children with CD will exhibit greater neuro-hemodynamic response in areas of the pain matrix involved in both the sensory-discriminative and affective aspects of the first-hand experience of pain. The behavioral measures will indicate that children with CD experience a more positive affective response to seeing others in pain than comparison children. Furthermore, children with CD will exhibit both less anatomical connection and functional connectivity between the PFC and the amygdala, which would be consistent with diminished self-regulation of emotional aspects of empathic concern for others in distress. Environment and Investigators: Our experienced team of investigators and consultants includes experts on CD, functional neuroimaging and cognitive neuroscience, especially in the area of empathy, and psychophysiological measurement. The University of Chicago provides a strong environment and resources for this project. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Because most crime is committed by juveniles, antisocial behavior in youth creates an enormous public health burden. Antisocial behavior not only harms victims in physical and psychological ways, but antisocial youth are at high risk for incarceration, injury and death from violence, substance abuse, and suicide. The proposed translational study will lead to an integrative understanding of basic brain-behavior processes involved in dysfunctional empathic concern in children with conduct disorder and suggest new approaches to treatment and prevention.
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2011 — 2014 |
Decety, Jean |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Neurological Mechanisms in Emotional Processes of Psychopathy
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The study of empathy at a neurological level has provided insight into the component processes that enable us to share each other's emotions, resonate with a person in need, and act in ways that benefit the other before the self. Individuals who act with blatant disregard for the well-being of others and behave as if they do not experience empathy are often characterized as psychopaths. Compared to other psychiatric disorders, little is known about the neurocognitive systems implicated in psychopathy, and there are currently no effective treatment protocols. Attention to the disorder is urgent: psychopathic criminals tend to be recidivistic and violent offenders, and the cost of their crimes to society reaches hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Determination of the nature of empathic deficits in psychopathic individuals will further guide intervention and treatment strategies in the clinical arena. The goal of this project is to explore the neurological mechanisms that underpin the function and dysfunction of the component processes of empathy and implicit emotion processing in 120 incarcerated offenders stratified into low, medium, and high scorers on Hare's Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R, 1991), along with 40 matched controls from the community. This project utilizes a mobile MRI system, which is brought to prisons to collect functional magnetic resonance imaging, structural and diffusion tensor imaging, autonomic nervous system measurements, and behavioral responses on-site at the correctional facilities. The tasks collected in the scanner will target the subjects'perception and interpretation of pain and emotions in others. Preliminary pilot data indicate that current theories, such as those hypothesizing chronic hypofunctioning of the amygdala or other limbic structures, may not be an accurate representation of actual deficits in psychopathy, since different patterns of activation, including amygdala and striatum activity, are so far seen in the psychopath group in response to our emotional stimuli. As well as shedding light onto the nature of empathy dysfunction within psychopathy, this project will provide a direct assessment for a model of empathy that relies on distributed information processing networks. A better knowledge of the mechanisms involved in empathy offers important implications for the examination and understanding of individuals with antisocial behavioral disorders, but complementarily, understanding which neural components of empathy are still intact and which differ in populations that are defined by patterns of counter-empathic behavior will help crystallize the understanding of the component processes which contribute to empathic behaviors in healthy adults. This translational project bridges social psychology and cognitive and affective neuroscience to bring to light the neural underpinnings of a costly societal problem at a systems and behavioral level. The findings of this research will expand our knowledge on the processes and mechanisms involved in the experience, expression, and regulation of emotion. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Psychopathy is a personality disorder with considerable negative impact on the welfare of society at large. Recently, interest in understanding and treating the disorder has surged, but without proper access and methods to ascertain the underlying biological and psychological differences behind psychopathy, treatments and interventions may be poorly informed. The proposed translational project investigates the component processes underlying empathy (a core feature of healthy interpersonal sensitivity that is deficient in psychopathy) and implicit emotion processing to examine these core faculties in incarcerated psychopaths, using magnetic resonance imaging. It marks the beginning of a systematic and empirical course of study designed to pinpoint the nature of empathic deficits in psychopathy such that directed targets for intervention and therapy can be effectively designed and implemented.
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2016 — 2020 |
Decety, Jean Kiehl, Kent A (co-PI) [⬀] |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Socioemotional Processing in Female Offenders - Resubmission 01
? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Increasing public awareness has accompanied recent scientific progress understanding the relationship between mental illness and some forms of persistent antisocial behavior. This has incited calls for research into possible interventions and preventive measures. A critical barrier to research in this arena has been an outdated, descriptive taxonomy of psychiatric constructs with overlapping symptomatology and little integration of emerging knowledge from neuroscience research. An array of traits and symptoms characterized within the framework of internalizing and externalizing psychopathology are features of several psychiatric constructs common in forensic settings. It will be essential for continued progress to identify basic features of pathology that are closely aligned with specific neurobiological systems underlying domains of cognitive processing. Among these, systems governing social processing, including emotion-related cognition and perspective-taking are particularly relevant in antisocial outcomes due to psychopathology. Our research team has previously explored the domains of social-affective processing as they relate to psychopathic traits in a large, forensic male sample. Here we propose to extend this work in a female forensic sample. Further, we integrate a wider array of dimensional constructs of pathology in socio-affective processing by examining features of psychopathic traits as well borderline personality disorder. Our research strategy utilizes functional magnetic resonance imaging for the investigation of neural circuits involved in dynamic facial affective processing, inferring affective states from social situations, and emotional perspective-taking. These data will provide us with essential information about gender differences in these processes, and whether critical features of pathology are uniquely related to variation in these circuits. Furthermore, we will examine the utility of variation within these circuits to predict poor behavioral outcomes of interest including antisocial behavior, substance abuse, and suicide. Importantly, to determine key features predictive of poor outcomes, we plan to compare traditional hierarchical modeling procedures with more advanced data-driven approaches. Traditional approaches utilize regions of interest identified through prior neuroimaging work, combined with psychological traits of interest and other key demographic variables. Advanced data-driven approaches utilize Independent Component Analysis for determining key functional networks of brain activity, and utilize machine learning approaches for selecting features essential for building appropriate models. Comparing these approaches will inform our planned future efforts for developing remediation strategies and evaluating efficacy at both a neurological level as well as behavioral level. These are essential, incremental steps toward a larger translational goal to develop improved, targeted treatment strategies informed by emerging neuroscience.
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