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Jean Decety

Publications and source records attributed to Jean Decety.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Empathy and judging other's pain: an fMRI study of alexithymia.

Because awareness of emotional states in the self is a prerequisite to recognizing such states in others, alexithymia (ALEX), difficulty in identifying and expressing one's own emotional states, should involve impairment in empathy. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we compared an ALEX group (n = 16) and a non-alexithymia (non-ALEX) group (n = 14) for their regional hemodynamic responses to the visual perception of pictures depicting human hands and feet in painful situations. Subjective pain ratings of the pictures and empathy-related psychological scores were also compared between the 2 groups. The ALEX group showed less cerebral activation in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), the dorsal pons, the cerebellum, and the left caudal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) within the pain matrix. The ALEX group showed greater activation in the right insula and inferior frontal gyrus. Furthermore, alexithymic participants scored lower on the pain ratings and on the scores related to mature empathy. In conclusion, the hypofunction in the DLPFC, brain stem, cerebellum, and ACC and the lower pain-rating and empathy-related scores in ALEX are related to cognitive impairments, particularly executive and regulatory aspects, of emotional processing and support the importance of self-awareness in empathy.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Social brain dysfunctions in schizophrenia: a review of neuroimaging studies.

Several studies have indicated that schizophrenic patients show impaired performance in various aspects of social cognition, including theory of mind, emotion processing, and agency judgments. Neuroimaging studies that have compared patients and healthy subjects during such mental activity indicate an abnormal hemodynamic response in the medial prefrontal cortex, the prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, the inferior parietal lobe, i.e., a set of regions known to be critically involved in social cognition. This paper addresses a number of issues raised by schizophrenia research into theory of mind, emotion perception and self-agency with regards to the neural systems that mediate social cognition. In healthy subjects, typical brain patterns are associated with theory of mind, emotion perception and self-agency; some activated clusters overlap, while others are distinct. For instance, activations in the paracingulate gyrus are almost systematically associated with theory of mind tasks, while the amygdala is mainly involved in emotion perception tasks. Additional foci are frequently found activated during those tasks: superior temporal sulcus, inferior frontal area. Moreover, the inferior parietal lobe is thought to contribute to agency judgments. In the light of the data on brain abnormalities and neurochemical dysfunctions in schizophrenia, we discuss the interaction of social cognitive dysfunction with the supposed information processing abnormalities caused by dopamine dysregulation.

Amygdala↗
PubMed2006

Motivation modulates the activity of the human mirror-neuron system.

It is not known whether the mirror-neuron system is modulated by motivation, such as hunger. In this study, 2 groups of healthy participants underwent 2 functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning sessions separated by 1.5 h interval. During each session, participants were presented with video clips of another person grasping objects or grasping food. The first session was conducted after participants from group 1 had fasted. Then these participants were allowed to eat and were scanned again. Participants from group 2 had a meal before the first session. Food-related stimuli elicited specific hemodynamic response in the parahippocampal gyrus, orbitofrontal cortex, and amygdala, when participants were in a hungry state as compared with a satiated state. In addition, regions that belong to the mirror-neuron system, including the inferior frontal gyrus, and the posterior parietal cortex showed greater response when participants were hungry. Increased activity was also detected in the extrastriate body area. A positive correlation was observed between the self-report ratings of hunger and the hemodynamic activity in the inferior frontal gyrus as well as in the amygdala. Our results suggest that motivation to eat modulates the neural activity in the mirror-neuron system, facilitating the preparation or the intention to act.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Human empathy through the lens of social neuroscience.

Empathy is the ability to experience and understand what others feel without confusion between oneself and others. Knowing what someone else is feeling plays a fundamental role in interpersonal interactions. In this paper, we articulate evidence from social psychology and cognitive neuroscience, and argue that empathy involves both emotion sharing (bottom-up information processing) and executive control to regulate and modulate this experience (top-down information processing), underpinned by specific and interacting neural systems. Furthermore, awareness of a distinction between the experiences of the self and others constitutes a crucial aspect of empathy. We discuss data from recent behavioral and functional neuroimaging studies with an emphasis on the perception of pain in others, and highlight the role of different neural mechanisms that underpin the experience of empathy, including emotion sharing, perspective taking, and emotion regulation.

Awareness↗
PubMed2006

Gender differences in the human mirror system: a magnetoencephalography study.

The present study investigated whether the human mirror-neuron system exhibits gender differences. Neuromagenetic mu (approximately 20 Hz) oscillations were recorded over the right primary motor cortex, which reflect the mirror neuron activity, in 10 female and 10 male participants while they observed the videotaped hand actions and moving dot. In accordance with previous studies, all participants had mu suppression during the observation of hand action, indicating activation of primary motor cortex. Interestingly, the female participants displayed apparently stronger (P < 0.05) suppression for the hand action than for the moving dot whereas the men showed the opposite (P < 0.05). These findings have implications for the extreme male brain theory of autism and support the hypothesis of a dysfunctional mirror-neuron system in autism.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

The power of simulation: imagining one's own and other's behavior.

A large number of cognitive neuroscience studies point to the similarities in the neural circuits activated during the generation, imagination, as well as observation of one's own and other's behavior. Such findings support the shared representations account of social cognition, which is suggested to provide the basic mechanism for social interaction. Mental simulation may also be a representational tool to understand the self and others. However, successfully navigating these shared representations--both within oneself and between individuals--constitutes an essential functional property of any autonomous agent. It will be argued that self-awareness and agency, mediated by the temporoparietal (TPJ) area and the prefrontal cortex, are critical aspects of the social mind. Thus, differences as well as similarities between self and other representations at the neural level may be related to the degrees of self-awareness and agency. Overall, these data support the view that social cognition draws on both domain-general mechanisms and domain-specific embodied representations.

Brain↗
PubMed2006

Neural circuits involved in imitation and perspective-taking.

Is it important to adopt the perspective of the model when learning a new skill? Is the "mirror system" equally involved when the teacher is facing or side-by-side with students? In this functional MRI study, we measured the cerebral hemodynamic changes in participants who watched video-clips depicting simple hand or foot actions. The participants either watched passively or imitated these actions. Half the video-clips depicted actions filmed from the perspective of the participant (1st-person perspective) and half from a frontal view as if watching someone else (3rd-person perspective). Behavioral results showed that latency to imitate was significantly shorter for the 1st-person perspective than the 3rd-person perspective. Functional imaging results demonstrate that the observation of intransitive actions engaged primary visual and extrastriate visual areas, but not the premotor cortex. Imitation vs. observation of actions yielded enhanced signal in the contralateral somatosensory and motor cortices, cerebellum, left inferior parietal lobule and superior parietal cortex, and left ventral premotor cortex. Activity in the lateral occipital cortex around the extrastriate body area was significantly enhanced during imitation, as compared to observation of actions confirming that this region involvement reaches beyond the perception of body parts. Moreover, comparisons of the two visual perspectives showed more activity in the left sensory-motor cortex for 1st-person, even during observation alone, and in the lingual gyrus for 3rd-person perspective. These findings suggest that the 1st-person perspective is more tightly coupled to the sensory-motor system than the 3rd-person perspective, which requires additional visuospatial transformation.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Weaving the fabric of social interaction: articulating developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience in the domain of motor cognition.

In this article, we bring together recent findings from developmental science and cognitive neuroscience to argue that perception-action coupling constitutes the fundamental mechanism of motor cognition. A variety of empirical evidence suggests that observed and executed actions are coded in a common cognitive and neural framework, enabling individuals to construct shared representations of self and other actions. We review work to suggest that such shared representations support action anticipation, organization, and imitation. These processes, along with additional computational mechanisms for determining a sense of agency and behavioral regulation, form the fabric of socialinteraction. In addition, humans possess the capacity to move beyond these basic aspects of action analysis to interpret behavior at a deeper level, an ability that may be outside the scope of the mirror system. Understanding the nature of shared representations from the vantage point of developmental and cognitive science and neuroscience has the potential to inform a range of motor and social processes. This perspective also elucidates intriguing new directions and research questions and generates specific hypotheses regarding the impact of early disorders (e.g., developmental movement disorders) on subsequent action processing.

Awareness↗
PubMed2005

Modulation of spinal excitability during observation of bipedal locomotion.

This study investigated whether a mirror mechanism exists for bipedal locomotion. We employed the soleus (plantar flexor) Hoffman reflex to investigate corticospinal excitability at the spinal level during observation of bipedal locomotion. The differential amplitude modulation of the left soleus Hoffman reflex during observation of bipedal heel-stepping (plantar dorsiflexion) (324+/-53 microV), standing still (383+/-60 microV), and bipedal toe-stepping (plantar flexion) (419+/-53 microV) reached significance (P < 0.05). The observation of bipedal toe-stepping produced a greater increase in spinal excitability than the observation of bipedal heel-stepping. These findings support the suggestion that there is a mirror mechanism for bipedal locomotion and they demonstrate that spinal excitability for observation of bipedal locomotion mirrors that for execution of bipedal locomotion.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Empathy examined through the neural mechanisms involved in imagining how I feel versus how you feel pain.

Perspective-taking is a stepping stone to human empathy. When empathizing with another individual, one can imagine how the other perceives the situation and feels as a result. To what extent does imagining the other differs from imagining oneself in similar painful situations? In this functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment, participants were shown pictures of people with their hands or feet in painful or non-painful situations and instructed to imagine and rate the level of pain perceived from different perspectives. Both the Self's and the Other's perspectives were associated with activation in the neural network involved in pain processing, including the parietal operculum, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC; BA32) and anterior insula. However, the Self-perspective yielded higher pain ratings and involved the pain matrix more extensively in the secondary somatosensory cortex, the ACC (BA 24a'/24b'), and the insula proper. Adopting the perspective of the Other was associated with specific increase in the posterior cingulate/precuneus and the right temporo-parietal junction. These results show the similarities between Self- and Other-pain representation, but most interestingly they also highlight some distinctiveness between these two representations, which is a crucial aspect of human empathy. It may be what allows us to distinguish empathic responses to others versus our own personal distress. These findings are consistent with the view that empathy does not involve a complete Self-Other merging.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

How do we perceive the pain of others? A window into the neural processes involved in empathy.

To what extent do we share feelings with others? Neuroimaging investigations of the neural mechanisms involved in the perception of pain in others may cast light on one basic component of human empathy, the interpersonal sharing of affect. In this fMRI study, participants were shown a series of still photographs of hands and feet in situations that are likely to cause pain, and a matched set of control photographs without any painful events. They were asked to assess on-line the level of pain experienced by the person in the photographs. The results demonstrated that perceiving and assessing painful situations in others was associated with significant bilateral changes in activity in several regions notably, the anterior cingulate, the anterior insula, the cerebellum, and to a lesser extent the thalamus. These regions are known to play a significant role in pain processing. Finally, the activity in the anterior cingulate was strongly correlated with the participants' ratings of the others' pain, suggesting that the activity of this brain region is modulated according to subjects' reactivity to the pain of others. Our findings suggest that there is a partial cerebral commonality between perceiving pain in another individual and experiencing it oneself. This study adds to our understanding of the neurological mechanisms implicated in intersubjectivity and human empathy.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

An fMRI study of imitation: action representation and body schema.

Recent neuropsychological investigations of apraxia have led to new hypotheses about the representational defects associated with imitation impairments in neurological patients. This fMRI experiment investigated the relation between imitation and the body schema in healthy subjects. Experimental conditions were derived from a factorial plan, and participants were asked to watch a human model performing bodily gestures and then to execute either an identical or a different action, with the same or different limbs. Brain areas activated when subjects imitated the model were traced to the representation of the action (main effect of performing an identical action regardless of limb), to the body schema (using the same limb regardless of action), or to both. The first set of analyses yielded a network associated with visual perception, indicating that action representation is primarily visuospatial not motor, while the second analysis highlighted regions involved in body schema including the inferior parietal cortex and the insula. It is suggested that imitation of simple body gestures requires both a visuospatial description of the observed model, sustained by visual perception areas in the right occipitotemporal and superior parietal cortices and a visuospatial description of one's own body, supported by the left inferior parietal lobule. These results favor a model of praxis proposing that imitation deficits in left inferior parietal lobe patients with apraxia reflect primarily an impairment of the body schema, while deficits of praxis in right parietal patients are limited to gestures demanding in terms of visuospatial analysis.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Neural correlates of action attribution in schizophrenia.

Patients with first-rank symptoms (FRS) of schizophrenia do not experience all of their actions and personal states as their own. FRS may be associated with an impaired ability to correctly attribute an action to its origin. In the present study, we examined regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) with positron emission tomography during an action-attribution task in a group of patients with FRS. We used a device previously used with healthy subjects that allows the experimenter to modulate the subject's degree of movement control (and thus action attribution) of a virtual hand presented on a screen. In healthy subjects, the activity of the right angular gyrus and the insula cortex appeared to be modulated by the subject's degree of movement control of the virtual hand. In the present study, the schizophrenic patients did not show this pattern. We found an aberrant relationship between the subject's degree of control of the movements and rCBF in the right angular gyrus and no modulation in the insular cortex. The implications of these results for understanding pathological conditions such as schizophrenia are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Feature uncertainty activates anterior cingulate cortex.

In visual discrimination tasks, the relevant feature to discriminate is defined before stimulus presentation. In feature uncertainty tasks, a cue about the relevant feature is provided after stimulus offset. We used (15)O-butanol positron emission tomography (PET) in order to investigate brain activation during a feature uncertainty task. There was greater activity during the feature uncertainty task, compared with stimulus detection and discrimination of orientation and spatial frequency, in the lateral and medial prefrontal cortex, the cuneus, superior temporal and inferior parietal cortex, cortical motor areas, and the cerebellum. The most robust and consistent activation was observed in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (Brodmann area 32; x = 0 y = 16, z = 40). The insula, located near the claustrum (x = -38, y = 8, z = 4), was activated during the discrimination tasks compared with the feature uncertainty condition. These results suggest that the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is important in feature uncertainty conditions, which include divided attention, expectancy under uncertainty, and cognitive monitoring.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Motor cognition: a new paradigm to study self-other interactions.

Accumulative empirical evidence has been reviewed in support of the notion that the production and perception of action as well as the interpretation of others' actions are functionally connected, and indeed, rely on common distributed neural systems in the premotor and parietal cortices. We suggest that these neural systems sustain shared representations between self and other that are crucial in social interactions. The inferior parietal cortex plays a special role in the sense of agency, which is a fundamental aspect to navigate within this neural network. The role of other brain areas that implement and regulate these shared representations remains to be specified.

Brain↗
PubMed2004

The putative pheromone androstadienone activates cortical fields in the human brain related to social cognition.

Using 15O-butanol positron emission tomography (PET), we measured regional cerebral blood flow changes in five healthy young women during exposure to androstadienone, a putative human pheromone, as well as pleasant (gamma-methyl-ionone), unpleasant (methyl-thio-butanoate), and neutral (dipropylene glycol; vehicle compound) odours. Compared with the odorous substances, androstadienone activated a widely distributed neuronal network. Two large cortical fields exhibited consistent activation in each contrast: the anterior part of the inferior lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the posterior part of the superior temporal cortex (STP). Intriguingly, these areas were deactivated by gamma-methyl-ionone and methyl-thio-butanoate. These brain regions can be identified as cortical fields underlying other than olfactory functions, including various aspects of social cognition and attention.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

The neural bases of cooperation and competition: an fMRI investigation.

Cooperation and competition are two basic modes of social cognition that necessitate monitoring of both one's own and others' actions, as well as adopting a specific mental set. In this fMRI, study individuals played a specially designed computer game, according to a set of predefined rules, either in cooperation with or in competition against another person. The hemodynamic response during these conditions was contrasted to that of the same subjects playing the game independently. Both cooperation and competition stances resulted in activation of a common frontoparietal network subserving executive functions, as well as the anterior insula, involved in autonomic arousal. Moreover, distinct regions were found to be selectively associated with cooperation and competition, notably the orbitofrontal cortex in the former and the inferior parietal and medial prefrontal cortices in the latter. This pattern reflects the different mental frameworks implicated in being cooperative versus competitive with another person. In accordance with evidence from evolutionary psychology as well as from developmental psychology, we argue that cooperation is a socially rewarding process and is associated with specific left medial orbitofrontal cortex involvement.

Adult↗