The neural underpinnings for empathy for pain in adolescence

Empathy is an important ability for understanding and sharing emotional states of others, which help us to understand and predict others' intentions. This fMRI study investigated the neural underpinnings of individual differences in empathic concern across adolescence. Thirty-seven participants aged 12 to 19 viewed pictures of social situations depicting intentional harm inflicting acts, harmed victims, and neutral scenarios. Subsequently the participants played a Dictator Game, where they were asked to divide money between themselves and the denoted other player, who was a person involved in the social scenarios viewed previously. The behavioral results showed that participants of all ages acted prosocially towards victims, fair towards neutral individuals and punishing towards offenders. fMRI results revealed a higher neural response in the superior temporal sulcus (STS) during the perception of stimuli depicting victims and offenders relative to neutral individuals. The reversed contrast showed an increase in hemodynamic activity in the temporo-parietal junction and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Possibly, this activation is related to participants identifying themselves more with neutral individuals than victims or offenders. In addition, brain activation in the STS while watching harm involving situations was correlated negatively with individual levels of empathic support. This finding suggests that participants reporting more empathic traits filter irrelevant information from social situations, as indicated by lower activation of the STS. Taken together, our findings emphasize the important role of individual differences in empathy during adolescence, both at the level of social behavior and level of neural underpinnings of social cognition.