Variation in the oxytocin receptor gene is associated with behavioral and neural correlates of empathic accuracy.

ABSTRACT: The neuromodulators oxytocin and serotonin have been implicated in regulating affective processes underlying empathy. Understanding this dependency, however, has been limited by a lack of objective metrics for measuring empathic performance. Here we employ a novel psychophysical method for measuring empathic performance that quantitatively measures the ability of subjects to decode the experience of another person's pain. In 50 female subjects, we acquired functional magnetic resonance imaging data as they were exposed to a target subject experiencing variable degrees of pain, whilst performing an irrelevant attention-demanding task. We investigated the effect of variation in the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) and the serotonin transporter gene (SLC6A4) on the psychophysical and neurometric

SUBMITTER: Laursen HR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4257152 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature