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Michalska, Emotion Understanding in Developmental Disorders Volume 10, No 1, Spring 2015 ISSN 1932-1066 Emotion Understanding in Developmental Disorders What Can Neuroscience Teach Us? Kalina J. Michalska National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda [email protected] Abstract: Empathy is thought to play a key role in motivating helping behavior and providing the affective basis for moral development. Neuroimaging studies clearly document that watching someone in pain elicits a negative arousal response in the observer to a stronger degree in children than in young adults. Findings indicate that although children and adults have similar patterns of brain response to perceiving other people in pain, there are important changes in the functional organization in the neural structures implicated in empathy and sympathy that occur over an extended period from childhood through adulthood. Keywords: Emotion sharing; moral development; empathy; disorder, developmental; distress; neuroatanomy, fuctional; neuroimaging. Emotion understanding has many facets. Emotional in neuroscience that is not readily available from other empathy—the ability to recognize, share, and make measures. The use of neural indices, in addition to the inferences about another person's emotional state—is more traditional self-report indices, allows to address one form of emotion understanding that is fundamental questions of clinical and developmental interest. to meaningful social interactions. Responses related Based on empirical findings from psychology to emotional empathy, such as feelings of sympathy and cognitive neuroscience, a number of components and concern, motivate prosocial behavior, inhibit contribute to the experience of empathy: (i) experience aggression and enable moral reasoning. Conversely, sharing: vicariously sharing the internal states of certain developmental disorders, such as conduct another, (ii) perspective taking: explicitly considering disorder (CD), are characterized by deficits in (and possibly understanding) the others' states and emotional empathy, which likely influence antisocial their sources, and (iii) prosocial concern: expressing responses and violent behavior toward others. Over motivation to improve others' experiences. The vast the last two decades, neuroscientists have devoted a majority of empirical research on the neuroscience of large and growing amount of attention to the neural empathy has focused on characterizing the first two basis of emotional empathy and to deviations from subprocesses: experience sharing and perspective normative emotional responding in the brain. Much taking. Given that they each represent two routes to can be learned about developmental disorders like CD the same ultimate goal (that is, understanding and from the progress that has been made in this domain. responding to another person's internal states), they Specifically, there are insights into perturbations in are thought to be subserved by surprisingly distinct emotion understanding that we can glean from work Kalina J. Michalska, "Emotion Understanding in Developmental Disorders: What Can Neuroscience Teach Us?" Existenz 10/1 (2015), 8-16 First published 10-13-2015 Emotion Understanding in Developmental Disorders: What Can Neuroscience Teach Us? 9 neural systems.1 Experience sharing is often associated tasks.5 Researchers also note that although studies of with a mechanism known as "neural resonance," which experience sharing and perspective taking clearly draw is a perceivers' tendency to engage overlapping neural upon dissociable neural networks, the fact that these systems when they experience a given internal state and studies tend to rely on different stimulus types and when they observe another person experiencing that task demands (i.e. passively viewing others in pain same state. Neural resonance is thought to accompany vs. explicit, active inferences about others) complicates the experience and observation of actions like motor the interpretation of their observed neural distinction. intentions, as well as visceral states such as pain.2 By In other words, dissociations between these neural contrast, perspective taking, usually observed by asking systems could either reflect a separation between the a person to draw explicit inferences about another's two empathic subprocesses, or they could reflect less emotional states—engages a system of midline and interesting variation in the types of stimuli exposed to superior temporal structures that are generally involved perceivers (NEP). in "self-projection": the ability to represent states outside To provide some background and with these of one's present moment, including the past, the future, caveats in mind, each of the components of empathy and the perspective of another person. (experience sharing, perspective taking) is described Until relatively recently, the neural activity here separately from both a developmental and a underpinning these two processes appeared almost neuroscience perspective, followed by a review of entirely non-overlapping. In other words, tasks and recent research with atypical populations. social stimuli that engaged one of these systems typically did not concurrently engage the other system.3 Experience Sharing Moreover, lesions to areas in each of these neural systems have been shown to produce dissociable impairments While there is some disagreement about the nature of in experience sharing and perspective taking.4 Together, empathic responding in very young children, there is such findings supported the claim that these two considerable evidence demonstrating that the affective processes are fundamentally dissociable routes to component of empathy develops earlier than the empathy. However, recent cognitive neuroscience cognitive component. Many aspects of experience research indicates that rather than being engaged in sharing are present at an early age and thought to rely isolation, neural systems that are involved in experience on involuntary processes like mimicry and neural sharing and perspective taking commonly co-activate resonance.6 A general consensus is that infants are when an observer encounters complex social cues, sensitive and responsive to the emotional cues of such as people engaging others in live joint attention others and that some of the basic building blocks of emotional empathy, like emotion sharing, are already present in the first days of life. For example, discrete 1 Jamil Zaki and Kevin N. Ochsner, "The Neuroscience facial expressions of emotion have been observed of Empathy: Progress, Pitfalls and Promise," Nature in newborns, including joy, interest, disgust and Neuroscience 15/5 (2012), 675-680. [Henceforth refered distress,7 which suggests that subcomponents of to as NEP] 5 See Elizabeth Redcay, David Dodell-Feder, Mark J. 2 Claus Lamm and Tania Singer, "The Role of Anterior Pearrow, Penelope L. Mavros, Mario Kleiner, John Insular Cortex in Social Emotions," Brain Structure & D. E. Gabrieli, Rebecca Saxe, "Live Face-to-Face Function 214/5-6 (June 2010), 579-591. Interaction during fMRI: A New Tool for Social Cognitive Neuroscience," NeuroImage 50/4 (May 3 Frank Van Overwalle and Kris Baetens, "Understanding 2010), 1639-1647. Others' Actions and Goals by Mirror and Mentalizing Systems: A Meta-Analysis," NeuroImage 48/3 6 Jean Decety and Meghan Meyer, "From Emotion (November 2009), 564-584. Resonance To Empathic Understanding: A Social Developmental Neuroscience Account," Development 4 Simone G. Shamay-Tsoory, Yasmin Tibi-Elhanany, and Psychopathology 20/4 (Fall 2008), 1053-1080. Judith Aharon-Peretz, "The Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Is Involved In Understanding Affective But Not 7 Carroll E. Izard and Peter B. Read, eds, Measuring Cognitive Theory Of Mind Stories," Social Neuroscience Emotions in Infants and Children, Cambridge: 1/3-4 (2006), 149-166. Cambridge University Press, 1982-1986. Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts 10 Kalina J. Michalska mature emotional experience and expression might potentially understanding the others' emotional states already be present very early on. Infants are able to and their sources. Such consideration includes the both send emotional signals and detect emotional knowledge of one's own and others' emotions and signals communicated by others around them. Human the acknowledgement that these may not be aligned. newborns are capable of imitating expressions of fear, Children's development of such understanding of sadness, and surprise,8 thus preparing them for later emotion fosters many adaptive processes, like peer emotional empathic responses through interaction with relationships and prosocial behavior. Consequently, others. Moreover, both human infants and nonhuman delayed or compromised emotion understanding may infant primates are known to respond to the distress of place youth at risk for developmental disorders, such others with distress. Infants who hear newborn cries cry as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or conduct disorder significantly more often than those who listen to silence (CD). The individual uses perspective-taking processes and those who hear simulations of a newborn's cry.9 to project themselves into the shoes of the other in order It appears that from early on in development, infants to understand what they are feeling. This aspect of are capable of emotional resonance.10 However, while empathy appears to require what is called "executive the capacity for two people to resonate with each other functions," including cognitive flexibility, inhibitory emotionally
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