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The neural correlates of narrative empathy – a functional magnetic resonance imaging studyAuthor: Kavita Vemuri Date: 2017-07-03 Report no: IIIT/TH/2017/47 Advisor:Bapi Raju Surampudi AbstractEmpathy entails the ability to understand (perspective-taking) and share the affective experiences of others, both processes considered the bedrock of all social interactions and critical for survival. Most empathy related neuroscience studies employ simple paradigms like pain-infliction or static images with emotional context and analysis focuses on either perspective-taking processing or affective experience overlooking the complex interaction among the processes. The initial studies informed how one understands pieces of the whole system with an assumption that when information from the pieces is fit the whole picture can be realized but this methodology has led to constrained theories on empathy process. To address the short-comings in understanding empathy, the focus of affective neuroscience research has shifted to studying this phenomenon as part of naturalistic social cognition. Hence with the goal to mimic real-life situations that evoke empathy, naturalistic or ecologically-valid paradigms are recent inclusions building upon the foundation provided by the earlier simple models. This study focuses specifically on narratives and empathy response. The aim of this study is to explore the neural correlates of narrative empathy using multi-modal visual movie narrative. Towards this, two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies were conducted using a total of 5 commercial full-length short film and movie clips. The first experiment had 3 movie clips (5-8minute long) from a diverse genre (animation, Hollywood and Indian Hindi movie) and the goal of this exploratory investigation was to identify the networks of empathy – cognitive (mentalizing), emotional and motor (affective experiences) and analyzing the dynamic nature of the neural activations as a function of the self-reported level of empathy experienced. The data-driven independent component analysis (ICA) method applied to isolate the underlying brain networks revealed: a) the ability of the fictional narratives induces emotional contagion and the potential to elicit empathy response b) activation of significant, distinct but overlapping empathy networks and c) the dynamic cross-correlation analysis between the task default-mode network (DMN) and individual empathy networks revealed that emotional empathy response displayed lower correlation while cognitive empathy higher correlation with DMN, suggesting the possible role of self-reflection or attention to an internal narrative triggered by external stimuli (Andrews-Hanna et al., 2012; Gusnard et al., 2001). This is a potentially significant finding for understanding the difference in cognitive and emotional empathy in clinical conditions like autism and psychopathy. Developing on the findings from the first study, a second fMRI study was designed to understand specifically the role of context in empathy response. Toward this, two diverse full-length short movies (8 minutes each) with real-life actors of ethnicity dissimilar to the participants were selected as stimuli. Functional imaging data was collected from two sets of extremely short clips (13-20seconds) with neutral and emotional scenes extracted from the full-length movie followed by the whole movie. Using a general linear model approach for data analysis, the contrasts estimated from each condition (activation for the short clips of neutral and emotional scenes versus the same clips in the full-length movie) were compared and the analysis showed that empathy sub-processes (emotional, cognitive and motor) were statistically significant when context is presented. The results also reveal the complex differential empathy processes in real-life social interactions, where responses are a function of context. Overall, the neural correlates of narrative empathy presented in this thesis, the first of the kind, suggest that a complex construct such as empathy should be best studied in with ecologically valid stimuli. The impact of the results, in studying empathy deficiency and interventions using narratives to enhance empathy, needs to be explored in the future. Full thesis: pdf Centre for Cognitive Science |
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