Human social interaction plays an important role in social success, adjustment and development. This involves also altruistic and prosocial behaviour1, which supports creating and maintaining social bonds, an important quality of functioning societies2. Prosocial behaviour is one of the most heritable social skills with twin heritabilities rising from 0.32 during early childhood to 0.61 during middle childhood3. It is strongly associated with social cognition and intelligence, and prosocial motivation is one of the three major cognitive components, which have been hypothesized to underlie empathyADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION{"citationID":"16tvof0ais","properties":{"formattedCitation":"{\rtf\super4\nosupersub{}}","plainCitation":"4"},"citationItems":[{"id":3140,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/8513/items/9AICVEX6"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/8513/items/9AICVEX6"],"itemData":{"id":3140,"type":"article-journal","title":"Theneuroscience of empathy: progress, pitfalls andpromise","container-title":"Nature Neuroscience","page":"675-680","volume":"15","issue":"5","source":"www.nature.com","abstract":"Thelast decade has witnessed enormous growth in the neuroscience of empathy. Here,we survey research in this domain with an eye toward evaluating its strengthsand weaknesses. First, we take stock of the notable progress made by earlyresearch in characterizing the neural systems supporting two empathicsub-processes: sharing others' internal states and explicitly considering thosestates. Second, we describe methodological and conceptual pitfalls into whichthis work has sometimes fallen, which can limit its validity. These include theuse of relatively artificial stimuli that differ qualitatively from the socialcues people typically encounter and a lack of focus on the relationship betweenbrain activity and social behavior. Finally, we describe current researchtrends that are overcoming these pitfalls through simple but importantadjustments in focus, and the future promise of empathy research if thesetrends continue and expand.
View fulltext","DOI":"10.1038/nn.3085","ISSN":"1097-6256","shortTitle":"Theneuroscience of empathy","journalAbbreviation":"NatNeurosci","language":"en","author":[{"family":"Zaki","given":"Jamil"},{"family":"Ochsner","given":"KevinN."}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2012",5]]}}}],"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"}4. The neurobiological basis of pro-social behaviour and empathy is complex. Empathic cognition has been linked to multiple subcortical regions such as the limbic system, the putative mirror system, a proposed mentalising network 5,6, as well as the septal area, which has also been associated with prosocial motivation e.g. ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION{"citationID":"XIZroMmB","properties":{"formattedCitation":"{\rtf\super7,8\nosupersub{}}","plainCitation":"7,8"},"citationItems":[{"id":3151,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/8513/items/W9689QEU"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/8513/items/W9689QEU"],"itemData":{"id":3151,"type":"article-journal","title":"Neuralcorrelates of giving support to a lovedone","container-title":"PsychosomaticMedicine","page":"3-7","volume":"74","issue":"1","source":"PubMed","abstract":"OBJECTIVE:Social support may benefit mental and physical well-being, but most researchhas focused on the receipt, rather than the provision, of social support. Weexplored the potentially beneficial effects of support giving by examining theneural substrates of giving support to a loved one. We focused on a prioriregions of interest in the ventral striatum and septal area (SA) because oftheir role in maternal caregiving behavior in animals.
METHODS: Twentyromantic couples completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging session inwhich the female partner underwent a scan while her partner stood just outsidethe scanner and received unpleasant electric shocks.
RESULTS: Support giving(holding a partner's arm while they experienced physical pain), compared withother control conditions, led to significantly more activity in the ventralstriatum, a reward-related region also involved in maternal behavior (p valuesless than .05). Similar effects were observed for the SA, a region involved in bothmaternal behavior and fear attenuation. Greater activity in each of theseregions during support giving was associated with greater self-reported supportgiving effectiveness and social connection (r values = 0.55-0.64, p values less than .05). In addition, in line with the SA's role in fear attenuation (presumablyto facilitate caregiving during stress), increased SA activity during supportgiving was associated with reduced left (r = -0.44, p less than .05) and right (r =-0.42, p less than .05) amygdala activity.
CONCLUSIONS: Results suggest thatsupport giving may be beneficial not only for the receiver but also for thegiver. Implications for the possible stress-reducing effects of support givingare discussed.","DOI":"10.1097/PSY.0b013e3182359335","ISSN":"1534-7796","note":"PMID:22071630","journalAbbreviation":"PsychosomMed","language":"eng","author":[{"family":"Inagaki","given":"TristenK."},{"family":"Eisenberger","given":"NaomiI."}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2012",1]]},"PMID":"22071630"}},{"id":3177,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/1947403/items/PSZ5IXEX"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/1947403/items/PSZ5IXEX"],"itemData":{"id":3177,"type":"article-journal","title":"Impairmentof prosocial sentiments is associated with frontopolar and septal damage infrontotemporaldementia","container-title":"NeuroImage","page":"1735-1742","volume":"54","issue":"2","source":"PubMedCentral","abstract":"Poets and philosophers have longacknowledged moral sentiments as key motivators of human social behavior.Prosocial sentiments, which include guilt, pity and embarrassment, enable us tocare about others and to be concerned about our mistakes. Functional imagingstudies have implicated frontopolar, ventromedial frontal and basal forebrainregions in the experience of prosocial sentiments. Patients with lesions of thefrontopolar and ventromedial frontal areas were observed to behaveinappropriately and less prosocially, which could be attributed to ageneralized emotional blunting. Direct experimental evidence for brain regionsdistinctively associated with moral sentiment impairments is lacking, however.We investigated this issue in patients with the behavioral variant offrontotemporal dementia, a disorder in which early and selective impairments ofsocial conduct are consistently observed. Using a novel moral sentiment task,we show that the degree of impairment of prosocial sentiments is associatedwith the degree of damage to frontopolar cortex and septal area, as assessedwith 18-Fluoro-Deoxy-Glucose-Positron Emission Tomography, an establishedmeasure of neurodegenerative damage. This effect was dissociable fromimpairment of other-critical feelings (anger and disgust), which was in turnassociated with dorsomedial prefrontal and amygdala dysfunction. Our findingssuggest a critical role of the frontopolar cortex and septal region in enablingprosocial sentiments, a fundamental component of moralconscience.","DOI":"10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.08.026","ISSN":"1053-8119","note":"PMID:20728544
PMCID:PMC2997153","journalAbbreviation":"Neuroimage","author":[{"family":"Moll","given":"Jorge"},{"family":"Zahn","given":"Roland"},{"family":"deOliveira-Souza","given":"Ricardo"},{"family":"Bramati","given":"IvaneiE."},{"family":"Krueger","given":"Frank"},{"family":"Tura","given":"Bernardo"},{"family":"Cavanagh","given":"AlysonL."},{"family":"Grafman","given":"Jordan"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2011",1,15]]},"PMID":"20728544","PMCID":"PMC2997153"}}],"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"}7,8. In addition, several neuropsychiatric disorders show abnormal social functioning. Understanding the neural basis of prosocial behaviour has remained however challenging due to the diversity of cognitive assessments, developmental changes in genetic architecture of prosocial and cognitive skills and the wide range of often costly neuroimaging technologies.