Emotional Egocentricity Bias across the lifespan

The present project aims to investigate the neural underpinnings of age-related changes in Emotional Egocentricity Bias (EEB). EEB is a recently established phenomenon indicating the influence of ones own current emotional state on empathy for another persons emotional state. It has been shown that young adults overcoming EEB mainly recruit two brain regions, the right supramarginal gyrus (rSMG) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Notably, both areas show a developmental trajectory that is characterized by maturation that is not completed yet by late adolescence, and a gradual decline which starts around the seventh decade. Based on this trajectory, we have recently investigated EEB across the life span in a behavioral study, and found that it follows a U-shape with highest bias in adolescence and elderly age, and lowest in young and middle-aged adulthood. The present proposal aims to investigate whether this behavioral finding can be explained by changes in brain structure and function across the life span. We will use functional and structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI, sMRI) and test the hypothesis that age-related changes in EEB are mediated by age-related changes in structure, function and connectivity of rSMG and DLPFC. We will recruit 160 participants from four different age cohorts: adolescents (12-17 years old), young adults (25-35), middle-aged adults (45-55) and older adults (65-75). During fMRI scanning, participants will engage in an experimental paradigm allowing the measurement of EEB and the neural processes engaged in overcoming it. In order to attain an exhaustive understanding of the structural and functional neural mechanisms underlying age-related changes in EEB, we will not only analyze fMRI activation and connectivity changes during the EEB paradigm, but also task-free changes in functional and anatomical connectivity, and brain structure. Our project will be the first to explore how age-related changes in brain function and structure are underpinning changes of EEB across the life-span. It will thus provide important insights into a phenomenon that is crucial for social behavior, and which may explain problems in social interaction in adolescence and older age. Beyond extending our knowledge on EEB, our project will also extend theoretical models of empathy and its regulation, a fundamental human ability.

Empathy comprises both the ability to identify and share anothers emotional state, and the ability to disentangle ones own from the others emotional state. When self- and other- related emotions are conflicting, empathy might be negatively influenced by egocentric tendencies. This phenomenon is referred to as emotional egocentric bias (EEB). Previous research showed that its extent changes across the life-span, with children, adolescents and older adults showing higher emotional egocentrism compared to young and middle-aged adults. With this project, we investigated the neural foundations of these age-related differences, and focused on adolescents (15-18 years) and older adults (65 years), whose brain processes were compared to a reference group of young adults (21-31 years). To investigate the neural basis of the EEB we adopted a well-established experimental paradigm able to induce contrasting emotions in two participants at time and thus allowing the measurement of the egocentric bias in the emotional domain. To gauge brain activity and brain structure, participants were lying in the MR scanner while performing the task. A multi- level and multi-method neuroimaging approach was then implemented to attain an exhaustive understanding of the age-related changes in the neural basis of EEB including segregation, functional connectivity and structural analysis. The results provided further evidence that older adults are emotionally more egocentric than young adults, while adolescents did not show this pattern observed in previous studies, thus conclusive considerations on emotional egocentrism in adolescents cannot be drawn. Neuroimaging results revealed that age-related differences in EEB are mainly associated with age-related changes in rSMG effective connectivity, and in particular that higher EEB in older adults is associated to lower rSMG effective connectivity with somatosensory cortices. These findings suggest the importance, particularly in aging, of intact neural connectivity for optimal socio- cognitive functioning. Our study thus prompts future studies to focus more on this aspect, opening up new interpretations of how the brain ages, and how this impacts social cognition and behavior.