ReviewBrain : a journal of neurology2014
Inability to empathize: brain lesions that disrupt sharing and understanding another's emotions.
Review in Brain : a journal of neurology, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 70 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
70 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Empathy in Adults with Acquired Brain Injury: a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Neuropsychology review · 2026Pooled it
- Individualized Prediction of Females' Empathic Concern from Intrinsic Brain Activity within General Network of State Empathy.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2022Pooled it
- The influence of role awareness, empathy induction and trait empathy on dictator game giving.PloS one · 2022Trial
- Placebo analgesia and its opioidergic regulation suggest that empathy for pain is grounded in self pain.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2015Trial
- Targeting the Cerebellar Circuit: How Exercise Intervention Reshapes White Matter Networks to Alleviate Autism Symptoms.Biology · 2026Article
- Neonatal brain structure, cognitively stimulating parenting and behavioural outcomes in preschool children with congenital heart disease and controls.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Article
- Effects of focal brain damage on political behaviour across different political ideologies.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2025Article
- Neural network dynamics underlying the bottom-up perception and top-down regulation processes of empathy.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Exploring rodent prosociality: A conceptual framework.Translational neuroscience · 2025Review
- Decreased Functional and Structural Connectivity is Associated with Core Symptom Improvement in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder After Mini-basketball Training Program.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2024Article
- Nearsighted empathy: exploring the effect of empathy on distance perception, with eye movements as modulators.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The impact of acute violent videogame exposure on neurocognitive markers of empathic concern.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Article
- Loss of empathy in stroke.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Association of inferior division MCA stroke location with populations with atrial fibrillation incidence.Heliyon · 2023Article
- Increasing empathic concern relates to salience network hyperconnectivity in cognitively healthy older adults with elevated amyloid-β burden.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2023Article
- Dark triad personality traits are associated with decreased grey matter volumes in 'social brain' structures.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Effectiveness of training in expressing positive emotions, reacting to change and greeting peers after childhood traumatic brain injury: a single-case experimental study.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Measuring Antisocial Behaviors in Behavioral Variant Frontotemporal Dementia With a Novel Informant-Based Questionnaire.The Journal of neuropsychiatry and clinical neurosciences · 2023Article
- Asymmetric affective perspective taking effects toward valence influenced by personality perspective taken.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2022Article
10 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
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Abstract
Emotional empathy--the ability to recognize, share in, and make inferences about another person's emotional state--is critical for all social interactions. The neural mechanisms underlying emotional empathy have been widely studied with functional imaging of healthy participants. However, functional imaging studies reveal correlations between areas of activation and performance of a task, so that they can only reveal areas engaged in a task, rather than areas of the brain that are critical for the task. Lesion studies complement functional imaging, to identify areas necessary for a task. Impairments in emotional empathy have been mostly studied in neurological diseases with fairly diffuse injury, such as traumatic brain injury, autism and dementia. The classic 'focal lesion' is stroke. There have been scattered studies of patients with impaired empathy after stroke and other focal injury, but these studies have included small numbers of patients. This review will bring together data from these studies, to complement evidence from functional imaging. Here I review how focal lesions affect emotional empathy. I will show how lesion studies contribute to the understanding of the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying emotional empathy, and how they contribute to the management of patients with impaired emotional empathy.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.