Differential Emotional State Reasoning in Young and Older Adults: Evidence from Behavioral and Neuroimaging Data
Journal Title: Journal of Neurology and Psychology - Year 2014, Vol 2, Issue 1
Abstract
The ability to infer the emotions, intentions, and beliefs of others has a self-protecting function in social life but declines with age. Little is known about the cerebral mechanisms underlying this impairment in older adults. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to map the brain regions associated with an emotional state reasoning paradigm in which subjects were required to infer the emotion of a seen facial expression by choosing one out of four statements describing what might have happened to the depicted person. Behaviorally, empathic reasoning performance correlated inversely with age with the older subjects (42-61 years, n=12) being significantly worse than the young subjects (22-39 years, n=14) in the accuracy of empathic reasoning. FMRI showed that young and older adults recruited similar brain regions but at different time points during empathic reasoning. In the older adults, higher order control areas became engaged early during viewing the target facial expressions, while in the young adults these were first recruited when all necessary information for the decision was present. Our data suggest that older subjects employ an inefficient mechanism leading to impaired empathic reasoning.
Authors and Affiliations
Prochnow D
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP195197
- DOI 10.13188/2332-3469.1000009
- Views 105
- Downloads 0
Differences in the Lipid Domain Organization of Erythrocyte Membranes in Patients with Schizophrenia
Gradually accumulating evidence indicates that schizophrenia may be accompanied by alterations of membrane phospholipids, however knowledge about how it affects lipid domain organization of membrane is lacking. We compar...
Biomarker Development for Brain-Based Disorders: Recent Progress in Psychiatry
Biomarkers are biological measures that are indicative of a specific disorder, its severity or response to treatment. They are widely used in many areas of medicine, but biomarker development for brain-based disorders la...
The Suicide Attempt in an Artificial Neural Network (Self Organizing Map)
In this paper, we have focused the position of subjects with suicidal ideation and suicide attempt, for psychiatric reasons, according to the platelet lipid fatty acids profile. A Self Organizing Map (SOM) has identified...
Interpersonal Psychotherapy Efficacy in Different Clinical Settings
Interpersonal therapy is an effective brief and limited therapy originally developed for major depression disorder but nowadays also highly effective in other psychiatric disorders [1,2]. This therapy uses the biopsychos...
Headache in Smartphone Users: A Cross-Sectional Study
Objective: Usage of Smartphones has increased rapidly and it may result in smartphone addiction. The aim of this study was to investigate the frequency of headache in smartphone users and to compare the headache characte...