Mirroring others' emotions relates to empathy and interpersonal competence in children
Section snippets
Participants
Sixteen children (nine boys and seven girls) participated in the study (with no overlap between these participants and those of Dapretto et al., 2006). Their age ranged from 9.6 to 10.8 years (M = 10.2, SD = 0.4). Participants had no history of significant medical (e.g., complications during gestation or birth, systematic malignancies), psychiatric (e.g., ADHD, autism), or neurological (e.g., seizures, myotonic dystrophy) disorders based on parental reports on a medical questionnaire. All children
Results
As expected, given the nature of the stimuli and the motor task, reliable activation during imitation was seen in primary somatomotor and visual cortices, as well as in extrastriate visual areas. Importantly, imitation of facial emotional expressions was also associated with reliable activation of the MNS (bilateral pars opercularis, adjacent ventral premotor cortex, and rostral inferior parietal lobule), insula, and amygdala (see Table 1, Fig. 1, Fig. 4). The frontal MNS–insula–amygdala
Discussion
Our findings confirm that, in children just as in adults, the observation and imitation of emotional expressions elicit significant activity in putative mirror neuron areas in inferior frontal cortex, as well as anterior insula and the amygdala. Further, they indicate a link between activity in these regions and two distinct social cognitive capacities: empathy and interpersonal competence. These results then suggest that even in children, shared neural representations of our own and others'
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Santa Fe Institute Consortium and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to J. Pfeifer. For generous support the authors also wish to thank the Brain Mapping Medical Research Organization, Brain Mapping Support Foundation, Pierson-Lovelace Foundation, The Ahmanson Foundation, William M. and Linda R. Dietel Philanthropic Fund at the Northern Piedmont Community Foundation, Tamkin Foundation, Jennifer Jones-Simon Foundation, Capital Group
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