Why don’t you feel how I feel? Insight into the absence of empathy after severe Traumatic Brain Injury

@article{Sousa2010WhyDY,
  title={Why don’t you feel how I feel? Insight into the absence of empathy after severe Traumatic Brain Injury},
  author={Arielle de Sousa and Skye McDonald and Jacqueline Rushby and Sophie H. Li and Aneta Dimoska and Charlotte James},
  journal={Neuropsychologia},
  year={2010},
  volume={48},
  pages={3585-3595},
  url={https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:25275909}
}
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81 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
4
Background Citations
29
Methods Citations
5
Results Citations
9

81 Citations

Changes in emotional empathy, affective responsivity, and behavior following severe traumatic brain injury

The results represent the first to suggest that level of emotional empathy post traumatic brain injury may be associated with behavioral manifestations of disorders of drive and control.

Empathy for people with similar experiences: Can the perception-action model explain empathy impairments after traumatic brain injury?

The results suggest that intact cognitive functioning and physiological responses are not necessary for normal experiences of empathy after TBI, and that the PAM has relevance with respect to explaining self-reported empathy for the experiences of others, but cannot explain the role of physiological responses associated with empathy.

Subjective emotional experience and physiological responsivity to posed emotions in people with traumatic brain injury.

Normal subjective responses were found in the context of reduced psychophysiological responding to the posed expressions, suggesting that another mechanism can contribute to normal feedback effects after TBI.

Impaired emotional contagion following severe traumatic brain injury.

Preserved rapid conceptual processing of emotional expressions despite reduced neuropsychological performance following traumatic brain injury.

Reduced empathy in people with TBI may be explained by processes downstream of the initial rapid conceptual processing of emotional information, such as flexibly attending and responding to this information in a goal-directed manner in complex environments.

Emotional Regulation Impairments Following Severe Traumatic Brain Injury: An Investigation of the Body and Facial Feedback Effects

TBI appears to impair the ability to recognize both the physical configuration of a negative emotion and its associated subjective feeling, as seen in adults who had suffered from a severe traumatic brain injury.

Using self-report measures such as the Balanced Emotional Empathy Scale

There is evidence that facets of social cognition are impaired in this population of TBI patients, and new assessment tools to measure social cognition following TBI are required that predict everyday social functioning.

Relationships Between Alexithymia, Affect Recognition, and Empathy After Traumatic Brain Injury

Results suggest that people who have a tendency to avoid thinking about emotions are more likely to have problems recognizing others' emotions and assuming others' points of view.

Sex-Based Differences in Affective and Cognitive Empathy Following Severe Traumatic Brain Injury

This study suggests this advantage of typically observed superior female empathy may disappear after a TBI, and possibly result in a disadvantage compared to their uninjured female peers.

Social and nonsocial cognition: Are they linked? A study on patients with moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury

The performance of subjects with moderate-to-severe TBI in the SC measures is related, at least partially, by the performance in the n-SC measures, and the SC model shows a two-factor structure characterized by a first factor that brings together SC measures that are highly related to n- SC domains and a second factor that brought together measures whose performance is not influenced by n-Sc domains.
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59 References

Understanding deficits in empathy after traumatic brain injury: The role of affective responsivity

Loss of emotional experience after traumatic brain injury: findings with the startle probe procedure.

The authors used affective modulation of the eyeblink startle response to examine the impact of traumatic brain injury (TBI) on emotional reactions to pictures. Participants were 13 individuals with…

Inability to empathize following traumatic brain injury

A high proportion of TBI patients lack the ability to empathize, but the deficit does not appear related to any specific cognitive impairment and cannot be predicted by measures of affect.

Responding to the emotions of others: Dissociating forms of empathy through the study of typical and psychiatric populations

Alexithymia and emotional empathy following traumatic brain injury

The results suggest an inverse relationship between alexithymia and emotional empathy, with significant moderate negative correlations found between TAS-20 and BEES scores, with TAs-20 total scores accounting for a significant amount of variance in BEes scores.

Two systems for empathy: a double dissociation between emotional and cognitive empathy in inferior frontal gyrus versus ventromedial prefrontal lesions.

The hypothesis that emotional empathic abilities (involving the mirror neuron system) are distinct from those related to cognitive empathy and that the two depend on separate anatomical substrates is tested.

Is emotional contagion special? An fMRI study on neural systems for affective and cognitive empathy

Emotional Empathy as Related to Mimicry Reactions at Different Levels of Information Processing

The hypotheses of this investigation were based on conceiving of facial mimicry reactions in face-to-face interactions as an early automatic component in the process of emotional empathy. Differences…

Automatic mimicry reactions as related to differences in emotional empathy.

Differences between subjects high and low in emotional empathy appeared to be related to differences in automatic somatic reactions to facial stimuli rather than to Differences in their conscious interpretation of the emotional situation.

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A model of empathy that involves parallel and distributed processing in a number of dissociable computational mechanisms is proposed and may be used to make specific predictions about the various empathy deficits that can be encountered in different forms of social and neurological disorders.
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