Although the voice-sensitive neural system emerges very early in development, it has yet to be demonstrated whether the neonatal brain is sensitive to voice perception. We measured the EEG mismatch response (MMR) elicited by emotionally spoken syllables “dada” along with correspondingly synthesized nonvocal sounds, whose fundamental frequency contours were matched, in 98 full-term newborns aged 1–5 days. In Experiment 1, happy syllables relative to nonvocal sounds elicited an MMR lateralized to the right hemisphere. In Experiment 2, fearful syllables elicited stronger amplitudes than happy or neutral syllables, and this response had no sex differences. In Experiment 3, angry versus happy syllables elicited an MMR, although their corresponding nonvocal sounds did not. Here, we show that affective discrimination is selectively driven by voice processing per se rather than low-level acoustical features and that the cerebral specialization for human voice and emotion processing emerges over the right hemisphere during the first days of life.

This investigation combined behavioral and functional neuroimaging measures to explore whether perception of pain is modulated by the target's stigmatized status and whether the target bore responsibility for that stigma. During fMRI scanning, participants were exposed to a series of short video clips featuring age-matched individuals experiencing pain who were (a) similar to the participant (healthy), (b) stigmatized but not responsible for their stigmatized condition (infected with AIDS as a result of an infected blood transfusion), or (c) stigmatized and responsible for their stigmatized condition (infected with AIDS as a result of intravenous drug use). Explicit pain and empathy ratings for the targets were obtained outside of the MRI environment, along with a variety of implicit and explicit measures of AIDS bias. Results showed that participants were significantly more sensitive to the pain of AIDS transfusion targets as compared with healthy and AIDS drug targets, as evidenced by significantly higher pain and empathy ratings during video evaluation and significantly greater hemodynamic activity in areas associated with pain processing (i.e., right anterior insula, anterior midcingulate cortex, periaqueductal gray). In contrast, significantly less activity was observed in the anterior midcingulate cortex for AIDS drug targets as compared with healthy controls. Further, behavioral differences between healthy and AIDS drug targets were moderated by the extent to which participants blamed AIDS drug individuals for their condition. Controlling for both explicit and implicit AIDS bias, the more participants blamed these targets, the less pain they attributed to them as compared with healthy controls. The present study reveals that empathic resonance is moderated early in information processing by a priori attitudes toward the target group.

Previous research on the neural underpinnings of empathy has been limited to affective situations experienced in a similar way by an observer and a target individual. In daily life we also interact with people whose responses to affective stimuli can be very different from our own. How do we understand the affective states of these individuals? We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess how participants empathize with the feelings of patients who reacted with no pain to surgical procedures but with pain to a soft touch. Empathy for pain of these patients activated the same areas (insula, medial/anterior cingulate cortex) as empathy for persons who responded to painful stimuli in the same way as the observer. Empathy in a situation that was aversive only for the observer but neutral for the patient recruited areas involved in self–other distinction (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex) and cognitive control (right inferior frontal cortex). In addition, effective connectivity between the latter and areas implicated in affective processing was enhanced. This suggests that inferring the affective state of someone who is not like us can rely upon the same neural structures as empathy for someone who is similar to us. When strong emotional response tendencies exist though, these tendencies have to be overcome by executive functions. Our results demonstrate that the fronto-cortical attention network is crucially involved in this process, corroborating that empathy is a flexible phenomenon which involves both automatic and controlled cognitive mechanisms. Our findings have important implications for the understanding and promotion of empathy, demonstrating that regulation of one's egocentric perspective is crucial for understanding others.

Prior research has shown that perceived social isolation (loneliness) motivates people to attend to and connect with others but to do so in a self-protective and paradoxically self-defeating fashion. Although recent research has shed light on the neural correlates of social perception, cooperation, empathy, rejection, and love, little is known about how individual differences in loneliness relate to neural responses to social and emotional stimuli. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we show that there are at least two neural mechanisms differentiating social perception in lonely and nonlonely young adults. For pleasant depictions, lonely individuals appear to be less rewarded by social stimuli, as evidenced by weaker activation of the ventral striatum to pictures of people than of objects, whereas nonlonely individuals showed stronger activation of the ventral striatum to pictures of people than of objects. For unpleasant depictions, lonely individuals were characterized by greater activation of the visual cortex to pictures of people than of objects, suggesting that their attention is drawn more to the distress of others, whereas nonlonely individuals showed greater activation of the right and left temporo-parietal junction to pictures of people than of objects, consistent with the notion that they are more likely to reflect spontaneously on the perspective of distressed others.

Whether observation of distress in others leads to empathic concern and altruistic motivation, or to personal distress and egoistic motivation, seems to depend upon the capacity for self-other differentiation and cognitive appraisal. In this experiment, behavioral measures and event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging were used to investigate the effects of perspective-taking and cognitive appraisal while participants observed the facial expression of pain resulting from medical treatment. Video clips showing the faces of patients were presented either with the instruction to imagine the feelings of the patient (“imagine other”) or to imagine oneself to be in the patient's situation (“imagine self”). Cognitive appraisal was manipulated by providing information that the medical treatment had or had not been successful. Behavioral measures demonstrated that perspective-taking and treatment effectiveness instructions affected participants' affective responses to the observed pain. Hemodynamic changes were detected in the insular cortices, anterior medial cingulate cortex (aMCC), amygdala, and in visual areas including the fusiform gyrus. Graded responses related to the perspective-taking instructions were observed in middle insula, aMCC, medial and lateral premotor areas, and selectively in left and right parietal cortices. Treatment effectiveness resulted in signal changes in the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex, in the ventromedial orbito-frontal cortex, in the right lateral middle frontal gyrus, and in the cerebellum. These findings support the view that humans' responses to the pain of others can be modulated by cognitive and motivational processes, which influence whether observing a conspecific in need of help will result in empathic concern, an important instigator for helping behavior.

Perspective-taking is a complex cognitive process involved in social cognition. This positron emission tomography (PET) study investigated by means of a factorial design the interaction between the emotional and the perspective factors. Participants were asked to adopt either their own (first person) perspective or the (third person) perspective of their mothers in response to situations involving social emotions or to neutral situations. The main effect of third-person versus first-person perspective resulted in hemodynamic increase in the medial part of the superior frontal gyrus, the left superior temporal sulcus, the left temporal pole, the posterior cingulate gyrus, and the right inferior parietal lobe. A cluster in the postcentral gyrus was detected in the reverse comparison. The amygdala was selectively activated when subjects were processing social emotions, both related to self and other. Interaction effects were identified in the left temporal pole and in the right postcentral gyrus. These results support our prediction that the frontopolar, the somatosensory cortex, and the right inferior parietal lobe are crucial in the process of self/ other distinction. In addition, this study provides important building blocks in our understanding of social emotion processing and human empathy.