(Control data published in the Journal of Neuro Report, Vol. 12, Issue 11, pages 2433-2438 in 2001; PTSD data under submission to the British Journal of Psychiatry; Schizophrenia data is being typed up and prepared for submission; PTSD and Schizophrenia data presented at many conferences in the U.S., Japan and Australia.)
ABSTRACT: Farrow, Tom: Brain Imaging and Empathic and Forgivability Judgments
1. Brain imaging of high-level cognitive functions is feasible.
2. Physiologically, forgiveness is almost certainly a multi-dimensional complex cognitive process.
3. Preliminary evidence suggests that it may be possible to demonstrate brain activation change, concomitant with symptom resolution and / or therapeutic input.
Forgiveness is likely to comprise multiple cognitive components. One such component may be the ability to judge the forgivability of another's actions. Another component may be an ability to empathize with others, including an aggressor. Empathy consists of two components: an affective (visceral emotional reaction) and a cognitive (understanding of the conspecific's behaviour). Empathy and forgiveness are also both heavily dependent on the expression and interpretation of emotions. We used functional MRI to examine the neural correlates of making empathic and forgivability judgments. To our knowledge this is the first study to examine the functional anatomy of forgiveness. We posited that forgiveness incorporates judgments of another's intentions, their emotional state and the forgivability of their actions. While it was not feasible to image subjects actively forgiving or empathizing in 'real life', we used narrative scenarios derived from everyday life, to probe the neural systems supporting these complex cognitive functions. We hypothesised that fronto-temporal regions would be differentially activated by these tasks.
Method:-12 healthy control subjects and 13 patients with postt
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Contact: Vicki Robb
vicki@jvrobb.com
703-329-3356
John Templeton Foundation
8-Oct-2003