The role of orbitofrontal cortex in processing empathy stories in 4-8 year-old children

• Main Authors: Tila Tabea eBrink, Karolina eUrton, Dada eHeld, Evgeniya eKirilina, Markus eHofmann, Gisela eKlann-Delius, Arthur M Jacobs, Lars eKuchinke
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2011-04-01
• Series: Frontiers in Psychology
• Subjects: Verbal; Children; fNIRS; affective empathy; cognitive empathy; non-verbal
• Online Access: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00080/full

This study investigates the neuronal correlates of empathic processing in childrenaged 4 to 8 years, an age range discussed to be crucial for the development ofempathy. Empathy, defined as the ability to understand and share another person’sinner life, consists of two components: affective (emotion-sharing) and cognitiveempathy (Theory of Mind). We examined the hemodynamic responses of pre-schooland school children (N=48), while they processed verbal (auditory) and non-verbal(cartoons) empathy stories in a passive following paradigm, using functional NearInfrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS). To control for the two types of empathy, childrenwere presented blocks of stories eliciting either affective or cognitive empathy, orneutral scenes which relied on the understanding of physical causalities.By contrasting the activations of the younger and older children, we expected toobserve developmental changes in brain activations when children process storieseliciting empathy in either stimulus modality towards a greater involvement ofanterior frontal brain regions. Our results indicate that children's processing of storieseliciting affective and cognitive empathy is associated with medial and bilateralorbitofrontal cortex (OFC) activation. In contrast to what is known from studies usingadult participants, no additional recruitment of posterior brain regions was observed,often associated with the processing of stories eliciting empathy. Developmentalchanges were found only for stories eliciting affective empathy with increasedactivation, in older children, in medial OFC, left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and theleft dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). Activations for the two modalities differonly little, with non-verbal presentation of the stimuli having a greater impact onempathy processing in children, showing more similarities to adult processing thanthe verbal one. This might be caused by the fact that non-verbal processing developsearlier in life