Author Interviews, Mental Health Research / 25.02.2020

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Leonardo Christov-Moore, Ph.D. Postdoctoral Scholar Brain and Creativity Institute University of Southern California MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: We've known for some time that empathy has both bottom-up, affective, somatomotor components, that let us quickly feel and internally simulate other peoples' internal states, and more cognitive, top-down components through which we make conscious inferences about others' beliefs, intentions and internal states. And there is interesting work suggesting that in many cases, these components work together. In our work, we took this idea further to propose that they exist in constant interaction, with the bottom-up systems  providing information that informs the top-down processes (aiding in our inference), which in turn provide modulation and control to the bottom-up processes (modulating the extent to which we "resonate" with others based on context, affiliation, etc.). Specifically, we found that you could predict many aspects of prosocial decision-making ( a top-down task) from bottom-up and top-down systems' interaction during simple bottom-up empathy tasks (passively observing someone experience emotion or pain). This led us to hypothesize that peoples' levels of empathic concern for others are dictated by stable patterns of interaction between these systems. In the current study, we made a strong test of this hypothesis: if these empathy-predicting patterns of interaction are stable across task demands, we should be able to observe them (and predict empathic concern from them) even when the brain is not doing anything ostensibly related to empathy! So that's what we did. (more…)
Author Interviews, Depression, Pain Research, Psychological Science / 19.06.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Markus Rütgen PhD Post-doctoral researcher Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Unit Faculty of Psychology University of Vienna  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Previous research has reported empathy deficits in patients with major depressive disorder. However, a high percentage of patients taking part in these studies were taking antidepressants, which are known to influence emotion processing. In our study, we wanted to overcome this important limitation. We were interested in whether the previously reported empathic deficits were attributable to the acute state of depression, or to the antidepressant treatment. To this end, we performed a longitudinal neuroimaging study, in which we measured brain activity and self-reported empathy in response to short video clips showing people in pain. We measured acutely depressed patients twice. First, before they started their treatment, second, after three months of treatment with a state-of-the-art antidepressant (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). (more…)
Author Interviews, Endocrinology, Gender Differences, Social Issues / 18.04.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Eider Pascual-Sagastizabal, PhD Professor of Evolutionary Psychology and Education University School of Education of Bilbao (Leioa) University of the Basque Country  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: The search for markers of aggression during childhood is a particularly relevant area of research, since the results of intervention and prevention during this developmental stage are more promising than those obtained during later stages. The psychobiological approach to aggressive behavior is of particular importance, as it analyzes the joint, interactive influence of both psychological and biological variables. We have found that there are different interactions on a biological and psychological level that could account for aggressive behavior in children. More deeply, empathy and hormones could together account for aggressive behavior. In fact, the interactions were different for boys and for girls.  (more…)
Author Interviews, Critical Care - Intensive Care - ICUs, JAMA, Pediatrics, Social Issues / 11.07.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Tessie W. October. MD, MPH Critical Care Specialist Children’s National Health System  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?  Response: This is a qualitative study that examines the impact of empathetic statements made by doctors on the ensuing conversation with families of critically ill children. We know families are more satisfied when doctors show empathy, but until this study, we did not know how these empathetic statements are received by families. In this study we found that doctors frequently respond to a family’s emotions by responding with empathy, but how the doctor presented that empathetic statement mattered. When doctors made an empathetic statement, then paused to allow time for a family’s response, the family was 18 times more likely to share additional information about their fears, hopes or values. Conversely, when doctors buried the empathetic statement within medical talk or if a second doctor interrupted, the empathetic statement frequently went unheard by the family. (more…)
Author Interviews, Mental Health Research, Psychological Science / 13.06.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: “Divine Piano” by François Philipp is licensed under CC BY 2.0Zachary Wallmark, Ph.D Assistant Professor of Musicology Directo MuSci Lab SMU Meadows School of the Art Music Division Dallas, TX 75275 MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Music making and listening is an intensely social behavior. Individual differences in trait empathy are associated with preferential engagement of social cognitive neural circuitry, including regions of the medial prefrontal cortex, cingulate, and insula, during the perception of socially relevant information. In our study, we used fMRI to explore the degree to which differences in trait empathy modulate music processing in the brain. We found that higher empathy people experience greater activation of social circuitry as well as the reward system while listening to familiar music, compared to lower empathy people.  (more…)