Mirroring others' emotions relates to empathy and interpersonal competence in children

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2007.10.032

NeuroImage

Volume 39, Issue 4, 15 February 2008, Pages 2076-2085

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2007.10.032 Get rights and content

Abstract

The mirror neuron system (MNS) has been proposed to play an important role in social cognition by providing a neural mechanism by which others' actions, intentions, and emotions can be understood. Here functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to directly examine the relationship between MNS activity and two distinct indicators of social functioning in typically-developing children (aged 10.1 years ± 7 months): empathy and interpersonal competence. Reliable activity in pars opercularis, the frontal component of the MNS, was elicited by observation and imitation of emotional expressions. Importantly, activity in this region (as well as in the anterior insula and amygdala) was significantly and positively correlated with established behavioral measures indexing children's empathic behavior (during both imitation and observation) and interpersonal skills (during imitation only). These findings suggest that simulation mechanisms and the MNS may indeed be relevant to social functioning in everyday life during typical human development.

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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Mirroring others' emotions relates to empathy and interpersonal competence in children

Abstract

Section snippets

Participants

Results

Discussion

Acknowledgments

Brain Res.

Brain Res. Rev.

Brain Cogn.

Conscious. Cogn.

NeuroImage

Neuron

Behav. Res. Ther.

Brain Res.

Trends Cogn. Sci.

Neuron

Brain Res.

Trends Cogn. Sci.

Trends Cogn. Sci.

Curr. Biol.

NeuroImage

NeuroImage

Neuropsychologia

Trends Cogn. Sci.

Neuron

Prog. Brain Res.

Trends Cogn. Sci.

NeuroImage

NeuroImage

Brain Res. Cogn Brain Res.

Neuron

Biol. Psychiatry

Trends Cogn. Sci.

Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev.

Curr. Biol.

Neuron

NeuroImage

Neuropsychologia

Transcranial magnetic stimulation highlights the sensorimotor side of empathy for pain

Nat. Neurosci.

The empathy quotient: an investigation of adults with Asperger syndrome or high functioning autism, and normal sex differences

J. Autism Dev. Disord.

“I show you how you feel”: Motor mimicry as a communicative act

J. Pers. Soc. Psychol.

Beyond the individual: the impact of ethnic context and classroom behavioral norms on victims' adjustment

Dev. Psychol.

Action observation activates premotor and parietal areas in a somatotopic manner: an fMRI study

Eur. J. Neurosci.

Neural mechanisms of empathy in humans: a relay from neural systems for imitation to limbic areas

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A.

The chameleon effect: the perception-behavior link and social interaction

J. Pers. Soc. Psychol.

How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body

Nat. Rev., Neurosci.

Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body

Curr. Opin. Neurobiol.

Neural systems supporting interoceptive awareness

Nat. Neurosci.