Developmental changes in the neural circuits underlying the experience of empathy

Empathy has been conceived of as a multi-dimensional construct, involving three separate but interrelated components: affective sharing, perspective taking, and self-regulation. While the capacity for affective sharing has been posited to be present at birth, behavioral data also supports the view that empathy continues to increase from the early years into adolescence, particularly with improvements in perspective taking and self regulation. Given the changes in these abilities, it is likely that some of the neural correlates of empathy that can be imaged also change with age, providing a standard against which atypically developing children can be measured. To test this hypothesis, normally developing participants, whose age ranged from 7 to 40 years old, as well as a group of adolescents with Conduct Disorder (CD), were presented with animated visual stimuli depicting painful situations. These situations involved either a person whose pain was caused by accident or a person whose pain was intentionally inflicted by another individual. The perception of other people in pain was associated with increased hemodynamic activity in the neural circuits involved in the processing of first-hand experience of pain. Interestingly, when watching another person inflicting pain onto another, regions that are consistently engaged in representing social interaction and moral behavior were additionally recruited. Significant age-related changes were detected in this condition, reflecting a change from a visceral emotional response critical for the analysis of the affective significance of stimuli to a more evaluative function. Adolescents with CD displayed significant deviations from this normative pattern of hemodynamic response, reflecting an inability to effectively regulate heightened emotional arousal through cortical processes.