In neuroscience, empathy is often conceived as relatively automatic. The voluntary control that people can exert on brain mechanisms that map the emotions of others onto our own emotions has received comparatively less attention. Here, we therefore measured brain activity while participants watched emotional Hollywood movies under two different instructions: to rate the main characters' emotions by empathizing with them, or to do so while keeping a detached perspective. We found that participants yielded highly consistent and similar ratings of emotions under both conditions. Using intersubject correlation-based analyses we found that, when encouraged to empathize, participants' brain activity in limbic (including cingulate and putamen) and somatomotor regions (including premotor, SI and SII) synchronized more during the movie than when encouraged to detach. Using intersubject functional connectivity we found that comparing the empathic and detached perspectives revealed widespread increases in functional connectivity between large scale networks. Our findings contribute to the increasing awareness that we have voluntary control over the neural mechanisms through which we process the emotions of others.

中文翻译：

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同理心自愿控制后大脑活动的变化

在神经科学中，同理心通常被认为是相对自动的。人们对将他人情绪映射到我们自己情绪的大脑机制施加的自愿控制受到的关注相对较少。因此，我们在这里测量了参与者在两种不同的指导下观看情感好莱坞电影时的大脑活动：通过同情他们来评估主要角色的情绪，或者在保持超然视角的情况下这样做。我们发现参与者在两种情况下都产生了高度一致和相似的情绪评级。使用基于受试者间相关性的分析，我们发现，当被鼓励去共情时，参与者的大脑活动在边缘（包括扣带回和壳核）和躯体运动区域（包括运动前区、SI 和 SII）在电影期间比鼓励分离时更同步。使用主体间功能连接，我们发现比较移情和分离的观点揭示了大规模网络之间功能连接的广泛增加。我们的发现有助于人们越来越意识到我们可以自主控制处理他人情绪的神经机制。