ArticleFrontiers in human neuroscience2018
The Effect of High-Definition Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation of the Right Inferior Frontal Gyrus on Empathy in Healthy Individuals.
Article in Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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9 citing papers in PubMed, 27 citations in OpenAlex.
- Computational Modeling of Sequential Dependencies in Mother-Child Social Interaction and Associations to Empathic Responses.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Top-down influence of the inferior frontal gyrus on motor cortex excitability during pain empathy.Communications biology · 2026Article
- A causal and dissociable role for the right inferior frontal gyrus in empathy for physical and social pain.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Effects of tRNS on perception of static and dynamic displays of social-emotional communication.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Distinct Patterns of Cognitive and Emotional Empathy in Parents of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Behavioral and Self-Report Study.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2025Article
- The alteration of the sensorimotor network in trigeminal neuralgia after microvascular decompression surgery: a follow-up study using independent component analysis.Frontiers in physiology · 2025Article
- Touched by loneliness-how loneliness impacts the response to observed human touch: a tDCS study.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
- Probing the role of the right inferior frontal gyrus during Pain-Related empathy processing: Evidence from fMRI and TMS.Human brain mapping · 2021Article
- Impaired Cognitive Empathy in Outpatients with Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain: A Cross-Sectional Study.Neural plasticity · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
13 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Empathy, including cognitive and emotional empathy, refers to the ability to infer the mental states of others and to the capacity to share emotions. The neural mechanisms involved in empathy are complex and not yet fully understood, and previous studies have shown that both cognitive and emotional empathy are closely associated with the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). In this study, we examined whether empathy can be modulated by high-definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS) of the right IFG. Twenty-three healthy participants took part in all three experimental conditions (i.e., anodal, cathodal and sham stimulation) in a randomized order. Participants then completed the Chinese version of the Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET), which assesses both cognitive and emotional empathy. The results show that scores obtained for cognitive empathy following cathodal stimulation are significantly lower than those obtained following sham stimulation. In addition, scores obtained for cognitive empathy following anodal stimulation are higher than those obtained following sham stimulation, though the difference is only marginally significant. However, the results fail to show whether the stimulation of the right IFG via HD-tDCS plays a role in emotional empathy. Our results suggest that the right IFG plays a key role in cognitive empathy and indicate that HD-tDCS can regulate cognitive empathy by inducing excitability changes in the right IFG.
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