Empathy and Judging Other's Pain: An fMRI Study of Alexithymia
Why is this work in the frame?
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.
Machine scores (provisional)
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
- Teacher spread
- 0.251 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
- Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline· verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it
Abstract
Because awareness of emotional states in the self is a prerequisite to recognizing such states in others, alexithymia (ALEX), difficulty in identifying and expressing one's own emotional states, should involve impairment in empathy. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we compared an ALEX group (n = 16) and a non-alexithymia (non-ALEX) group (n = 14) for their regional hemodynamic responses to the visual perception of pictures depicting human hands and feet in painful situations. Subjective pain ratings of the pictures and empathy-related psychological scores were also compared between the 2 groups. The ALEX group showed less cerebral activation in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), the dorsal pons, the cerebellum, and the left caudal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) within the pain matrix. The ALEX group showed greater activation in the right insula and inferior frontal gyrus. Furthermore, alexithymic participants scored lower on the pain ratings and on the scores related to mature empathy. In conclusion, the hypofunction in the DLPFC, brain stem, cerebellum, and ACC and the lower pain-rating and empathy-related scores in ALEX are related to cognitive impairments, particularly executive and regulatory aspects, of emotional processing and support the importance of self-awareness in empathy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
The record
- Venue
- Cerebral Cortex
- Topic
- Psychosomatic Disorders and Their Treatments
- Field
- Medicine
- Canadian institutions
- —
- Funders
- —
- Keywords
- EmpathyAlexithymiaPsychologyFunctional magnetic resonance imagingDorsolateral prefrontal cortexAnterior cingulate cortexInsulaToronto Alexithymia ScaleSocioemotional selectivity theoryMedial frontal gyrusInferior frontal gyrusAudiologyNeurosciencePrefrontal cortexCognitionClinical psychologyPsychiatryMedicine
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes