Altered empathy-related resting-state functional connectivity in adolescents with early-onset schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders.

Altered empathy-related resting-state functional connectivity in adolescents with early-onset schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders. Asian J Psychiatr. 2020 May 16;53:102167 Authors: Shi LJ, Zhou HY, Wang Y, Shen YM, Fang YM, He YQ, Ou JJ, Li HB, Luo XR, Cheung EFC, Pantelis C, Chan RCK Abstract Empathy refers to the ability to understand other people's feelings and reacting emotionally to others. Impaired empathy has been reported in both individuals with schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Despite overlaps, few studies have directly examined the neural mechanisms of impaired empathy in these two clinical groups. We used resting-state fMRI to investigate the neural correlates of empathic functioning in adolescents with ASD (N = 11), early-onset schizophrenia (EOS) (N = 20), and typically developing (TD) controls (N = 26). Their parents completed the Griffith Empathy Measure (GEM) to assess the adolescents' empathic capacity. We found that EOS and ASD participants both exhibited impaired empathy as measured by the GEM, especially in cognitive empathy (post-hoc ps < 0.05). Regions-of-interest-based functional connectivity revealed decreased connectivity between the salience network (SN) (i.e., the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex) and core regions of the mentalizing network (e.g., the temporal-parietal junction and the precuneus), and among the SN and the bilateral superior temporal gyri (STG) ...
Source: Asian Journal of Psychiatry - Category: Psychiatry Tags: Asian J Psychiatr Source Type: research