The Impaired Empathy Circuit

Social apathy may arise from deficient connections among emotional brain centers.

When  most of us imagine someone in pain, we feel uncomfortable and want  to  help. Psychopaths do not: a callousness toward others' suffering is  the  central feature of a psychopathic personality. Now an imaging study   finds that psychopathic inmates have deficits in a key empathy circuit   in the brain, pointing to a potential therapeutic target.

Jean  Decety, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, and his   colleagues used functional MRI to scan the brains of 121 male prison   inmates while they looked at photos of a painful moment, such as a foot   stepping on a nail or a finger being smashed in a drawer. The inmates   were instructed to imagine the scenario happening to themselves or to   another person, a perspective-switching technique that easily elicits   empathy in most people.

Inmates who scored the highest on a  standard psychopathy test showed a  normal response in pain perception  and brain centers for emotion when  imagining the pain for themselves.  Yet when asked to imagine the  scenario happening to others, their  brains did not show typical  connectivity between the amygdala (emotion  center of the brain), an area important for fear and  emotional  processing, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a region  vital for  emotion regulation, empathy and morality. Some results even  indicated  that pleasure regions might have become active instead.

The  brain areas that are undercommunicating in psychopathy “are key for   experiencing empathetic concern and caring for one another, which is   what empathy is all about and what individuals who score high on   psychopathy do not have,” Decety says. Cognitive therapy may help some   psychopaths; he suggests clinicians could measure changes in these   faulty connections to home in on the best strategies to stimulate   empathy. [For more on psychopathy, see “Inside the Mind of a  Psychopath,” by Kent A. Kiehl and Joshua W. Buckholtz; Scientific American Mind, September/October 2010.]

Psychopaths Might Have an Impaired Empathy Circuit

Social apathy may arise from deficient connections among emotional brain centers

Dec 19, 2013 |By Meredith Knight