Neural substrates of socioemotional self‐awareness in neurodegenerative disease

Brain and Behavior

Marc Sollberger²  Howard J. Rosen²  Tal Shany-Ur²  Jerin Ullah²  Christine M. Stanley²  Victor Laluz²  Michael W. Weiner¹  Stephen M. Wilson³  Bruce L. Miller² 

[1] Department of Radiology, University of California, San Francisco, California;Memory and Aging Center, University of California, San Francisco, California;Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, Tucson, Arizona

关键词: Affective perspective taking;    dementia;    empathy;    infero‐lateral temporal cortex;    neurodegeneration;    semantic self‐knowledge;    unawareness;    voxel‐based morphometry;   

DOI  :  10.1002/brb3.211

来源: Wiley

【 摘 要 】

Abstract

Background

Neuroimaging studies examining neural substrates of impaired self-awareness in patients with neurodegenerative diseases have shown divergent results depending on the modality (cognitive, emotional, behavioral) of awareness. Evidence is accumulating to suggest that self-awareness arises from a combination of modality-specific and large-scale supramodal neural networks.

Methods

We investigated the structural substrates of patients' tendency to overestimate or underestimate their own capacity to demonstrate empathic concern for others. Subjects' level of empathic concern was measured using the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, and subject-informant discrepancy scores were used to predict regional atrophy pattern, using voxel-based morphometry analysis. Of the 102 subjects, 83 were patients with neurodegenerative diseases such as behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) or semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA); the other 19 were healthy older adults.

Results

bvFTD and svPPA patients typically overestimated their level of empathic concern compared to controls, and overestimating one's empathic concern predicted damage to predominantly right-hemispheric anterior infero-lateral temporal regions, whereas underestimating one's empathic concern showed no neuroanatomical basis.

Conclusions

These findings suggest that overestimation and underestimation of one's capacity for empathic concern cannot be interpreted as varying degrees of the same phenomenon, but may arise from different pathophysiological processes. Damage to anterior infero-lateral temporal regions has been associated with semantic self-knowledge, emotion processing, and social perspective taking; neuropsychological functions partly associated with empathic concern itself. These findings support the hypothesis that—at least in the socioemotional domain—neural substrates of self-awareness are partly modality-specific.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2014 The Authors. Brain and Behavior published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.