Edited by: Judit Gervain, CNRS – Universite Paris Descartes, France
Reviewed by: Kalina J. Michalska, The University of Chicago, USA; Sarah Lloyd-Fox, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
*Correspondence: Tila Tabea Brink, General and Neurocognitive Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin, Germany. e-mail:
Lars Kuchinke, Experimental Psychology, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universitätsstraße 150, 44801 Bochum, Germany.e-mail:
This article was submitted to Frontiers in Language Sciences, a specialty of Frontiers in Psychology.
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This study investigates the neuronal correlates of empathic processing in children aged 4–8 years, an age range discussed to be crucial for the development of empathy. Empathy, defined as the ability to understand and share another person's inner life, consists of two components: affective (emotion-sharing) and cognitive empathy (Theory of Mind). We examined the hemodynamic responses of preschool and school children (
As social interaction is central to the life of human beings, paying attention to and trying to understand the cognitive and affective processes of others is important for the prediction and interpretation of their behavior. These skills are studied under the label of social cognition. Studies concerning the neural basis of social cognition have mainly focused on adults (Amodio and Frith,
Empathy, the ability to understand and share another person's inner life, is an essential process in social cognition. It is a complex form of psychological inference, in which observation, memory, knowledge, and reasoning as well as affective sharing are combined (Ickes,
The ability to understand the intentions of another person, so-called
In contrast,
Cognitive empathy is defined as the ability to imagine or “experience” a situation from another person's point of view. At the age of two, typically developing children understand another person's intentions, independently from their own intentions (Leslie,
Affective empathy is defined as an affective response, derived from the apprehension and comprehension of another person's affective state, which is identical or very similar to what the other person is expected to feel (Eisenberg,
At present, an important argument for distinguishing the two different approaches are the different roles affective and cognitive empathy play in psychiatric disorders like autism and psychopathy: While patients with autism spectrum disorder often show impairment in ToM (Baron-Cohen et al.,
Most imaging studies on cognitive empathy have examined mentalizing-tasks that did not include any affective component (Decety and Jackson,
A neural network often described in empathy research is the frontal mirror neuron system (MNS), including the pars opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG; e.g., Singer,
Based on studies on autism and psychopathy, some researchers still argue for a dissociation and define empathy as a general term for a collection of specific neurocognitive functions (Blair,
In the present study we investigate the contribution of the OFC to empathic processing, both, affective and cognitive, in young children.
There is a great lack of developmental studies on empathy and a need for investigating the different levels of empathic responding in further detail, in particular with respect to their underlying neural networks. A neurodevelopmental approach on cognitive and affective empathy may therefore help to better dissociate the two mechanisms (Singer,
The present study examines the processing of affective and cognitive empathy in children between 4 and 8 years of age in a passive empathy recognition paradigm. Most studies on empathy have examined adults and those studies that investigated empathy processing in children examined samples aged seven (Decety et al.,
Empathy development and its neural correlates in preschool children are poorly understood. Therefore, the age range examined in the current study includes preschoolers as well as young school children. One reason for the lack of developmental studies on neural correlates of affective and cognitive empathy is that fMRI studies with children are relatively rare. It is still a challenge to perform experiments with small children in the noisy and unfamiliar environment of an fMRI scanner. Another problem is the high level of motion artifacts, occurring during the measurement of young children (Karmiloff-Smith,
To measure the neural correlates of empathy processing in children, we used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). This is a non-invasive, functional optical imaging method, assessing changes in cortical oxygenation by applying near-infrared light to measure changes in tissue attenuation. It monitors the brain function by measuring changes in the concentrations of oxygenated [oxy-Hb] and deoxygenated hemoglobin [deoxy-Hb] and is based on the fact that hemoglobin changes its color when the oxygen content changes (Obrig and Villringer,
There are no studies on empathy using fNIRS so far and generally imaging studies on empathy in children are rare. Therefore, a first aim of this study is to introduce fNIRS to the field of neurodevelopmental research on empathy processing. Functional brain responses in orbitofrontal and posterior temporal brain regions are investigated under affective and cognitive empathy conditions to reveal similarities and differences in the underlying cortical networks. Furthermore, empathic responses in young children were examined in two stimulus modalities, a non-verbal set of cartoon stories and a set of verbal, auditorily presented stories. The aim was to control for modality-specific effects which allows us to identify modality-independent and -specific activations. Thus, we expected that brain regions that are activated in a modality-independent manner, like the posterior temporal regions reported by Kobayashi et al. (
As most studies investigated adults, we had to derive our hypotheses mainly from those results, tentatively assuming analogous processing in children. The OFC supports affective as well as cognitive empathy, thus we expect specific activations in this region in both conditions. Hynes et al. (
According to ToM developmental research, older children have developed higher empathy skills and should thus show different activation-patterns than younger subjects. As affective empathy starts to develop very early but seems to change in quality with cognitive development, one would expect age-related differences in both, affective and cognitive empathy responses. In particular, Decety and colleagues (Decety and Michalska;
Forty-eight participants (22 male/26 female) aged between 4;0 and 8;8 (mean age 6;2) were recruited from daycare centers and primary schools in Berlin. To examine developmental changes, two age groups were formed relative to the age of 6;6. Because in the German educational system children start attending primary school at the age of 6, and one can assume that formal education has an important impact on social and cognitive development, the younger group mainly consisted of preschool children aged 4;0–6;6 (
All participants were native German speakers, never had injuries or operations on the brain, were not taking any medication and did not show behavioral or neurological conspicuities. Their parents received an information-brochure and obtained 20 Euros for participation. Both, children and parents were informed about the background of the study and its procedure and gave their agreement. Parents attended the whole session and could observe it via video from a second laboratory room. The recruitment and experimental procedure was performed in accordance with the local ethical guidelines and consent and assent were obtained from the parent(s) or legal guardian(s) and the child.
A short form of the Kaufman assessment battery for children (K-ABC; Kaufman and Applegate,
The material consisted of two sets of stimuli, a visual set of non-verbal cartoon stories and an auditory set of verbal listening stories. Every cartoon consisted of four pictures and every story consisted of four sentences, which were presented in a fixed order (see Figure
Affective empathy (two characters)
Cognitive empathy (one character)
Neutral stories with one character
Neutral stories with two characters
The material is based on a study by Völlm et al. (
The verbal listening stories were derived from the cartoon stories by describing each picture by one sentence (Figure
The final material was derived from a larger set of stories by means of a rating study. Sixteen to 24 adults rated all cartoon stories online, evaluating how strongly the course of the story elicits affective empathy on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very strongly), to control for the affective empathy elicited by these stories.
The final stimulus set consisted of 48 stories in each stimulus modality, 12 of each experimental condition, half of them positive, logical, or in correct order and half negative, not logical, or scrambled. For the cartoon condition, an ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of affective empathy ratings [
The stimuli were presented on a standard 17′ PC screen, which was placed 60 cm in front of the participants. The experiment started with an instruction to listen to in the verbal session or watch the stories carefully in the non-verbal session, respectively, followed by an example story introducing each block of one of the four experimental conditions. Verbal listening stories were presented via earphones. Stimulus presentation and timing in both modalities were controlled using OGAMA (version 2.0; Voßkühler et al.,
After clicking the mouse, a colored screen appeared in both modalities, and after a second mouse click, an example story started. Following the example, a question was asked (“Did you understand?”). This allowed time for more detailed instructions and answering questions. When all questions were answered to the satisfaction of the child, clicking the mouse once again started the actual setting.
For the non-verbal modality, each trial consisted of four pictures, each presented for 1.5 s, so that one cartoon story lasted 6 s. After the fourth picture, a fixation cross (+) appeared in the middle of the screen for 4 s, and the participants were asked to simply click the mouse. This mouse clicking after each story did not have an influence on the speed of presentation, but was used to keep the children concentrated.
The four blocks (affective, cognitive, neutral with one character, and neutral with two characters), each containing 12 stories, were presented in random order. Inside of each block the two types of stories were presented in equal number and pseudorandomized order: an affective empathy block contained six stories with positive and six stories with negative ending; a cognitive empathy block contained six stories with logical and six stories with non-logical ending, and in neutral blocks six stories were presented in correct and six in scrambled order. Between the blocks a colored screen appeared, so that the participants could take a break before continuing by clicking.
The verbal session worked exactly the same way, except that a fixation cross was displayed while the participants listened to the four sentences. The average length of one sentence was 2.9 s. The two runs (two modalities) were presented one after the other, with a short break in between. Half of the subjects started with the cartoons, the other half with the listening stories.
Every cartoon story took 6 s plus break, thus every block took 2 min (8 min for all four blocks) plus breaks and examples for the visual trials; the auditory blocks took 3.13 min on average each, 12.51 min altogether plus breaks and examples.
Throughout the whole measuring procedure, a supervisor stayed in the room, read instructions to the children and answered questions.
Parallel to the experimental sessions, all parents answered a German version of the “Griffith empathy measure (GEM)” scale (Dadds et al.,
The fNIRS measurements were performed by a DYNOT System (32 sources/32 detectors, NIRx Medizintechnik, GmbH, Berlin, Germany) operating at two wavelengths (760 and 830 nm) at a sampling rate of 4.13 Hz. An optode-set of 11 sources and 21 detectors was used, making 39 source detector pairs (channels; see Figure
In order to avoid time-consuming optode positioning procedures, the Easycap was prepared in advance by placing the optodes on it. Some sources and detectors had to be optimized by fixing hair with a small amount of gel (EASYCAP Supervisc, high-viscosity electrolyte-gel) to make sure no hair absorbed the light.
The NILAB toolbox (Koch et al.,
The experimental time courses were block-averaged over six repetitions of every condition in the interval between −10 and +20 s around the stimulus onset of the last sentence (to cover the length of the hemodynamic responses to each presented story as a whole) and detrended to correct for linear baseline drift.
Preprocessed data were subjected to a general linear model (GLM) analysis. Each of the four conditions – cognitive empathy, affective empathy, neutral story with one character, neutral story with two characters – was modeled with two predictors: The first predictor of each condition modeled cerebral activation at the onsets of the first three sentences/pictures of the story, the second predictor of each condition modeled the onsets of the last sentence/picture. Delta functions of the sentence/picture onsets were convolved with a hemodynamic response function (sum of two gamma functions with time constants of 5 and 16 s and with weights of 1 and −1/6). The predictors were subjected to the same block average procedure as the experimental time courses, accounting for blocks dismissed due to motion correction. An example of block-averaged data together with predictor time course is shown in Figure
Optode locations as a basis for neuroanatomical labeling of the NIRS channels were obtained by means of an anatomical MRI template. Since the brain volume and geometry changes only slightly after the age of two (Faria et al.,
Channels were clustered to define regions of interest, based on our initial hypotheses. One cluster comprised the average signal of three defining channels (see Figure
Cluster | Channels |
---|---|
Medial OFC | Ch1, ch9, ch10 |
Left OFC | Ch2, ch7, ch8 |
Right OFC | Ch5, Ch11, Ch12 |
Left PTR | Ch30, ch31, ch37 |
Right PTR | Ch33, ch35, ch38 |
For each stimulus modality one-sample
To detect effects of age, paired
Due to unusually high residual variance in some subjects, data for seven cartoon and four listening sessions had to be excluded from further analysis. Cartoon (
Main effects | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
[Oxy-Hb] | [Deoxy-Hb] | |||
Medial OFC | 3.342 | 0.002** | 0.146 | 0.884 |
Left OFC | 5.048 | 0.000** | −3.504 | 0.001** |
Right OFC | 4.137 | 0.000** | −3.069 | 0.004** |
Left dlPFC (channel 15) | 0.747 | 0.472 | −3.481 | 0.001** |
Left dlPFC (channel 17) | 2.823 | 0.007** | −1.771 | 0.084 |
Right dlPFC (channel 19) | 3.007 | 0.005** | −0.546 | 0.588 |
Left OFC | 2.800 | 0.008** | −3.937 | 0.000** |
Right OFC | 3.029 | 0.004** | −1.251 | 0.218 |
Left dlPFC (channel 16) | 3.851 | 0.000** | −2.198 | 0.043 |
Main effects | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
[Oxy-Hb] | [Deoxy-Hb] | |||
Left OFC | 2.741 | 0.009** | −1.195 | 0.239 |
Left OFC | 1.386 | 0.173 | −4.035 | 0.000** |
Right OFC | 1.313 | 0.196 | −2.952 | 0.005** |
Right dlPFC (channel 20) | 0.126 | 0.827 | −2.951 | 0.005** |
Significant activations were observed in medial OFC and bilateral OFC. In addition, channels in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) revealed significant activations: channel 15 [deoxy-Hb] and 17 [oxy-Hb] of the left and channel 19 [oxy-Hb] of the right dlPFC (see Table
The
The left OFC was significantly activated for the affective condition. Age differences were observed in [deoxy-Hb] channel 24 [
Significant activations related to cognitive empathy processing were elicited in right and left OFC, as well as in channel 16 [oxy-Hb] of the left dlPFC. No significant age differences were observed in this contrast.
Significant activations were observed in left and right OFC. Additionally [deoxy-Hb] channel 20 of the right dlPFC showed a significant activation. No age-group differences were found.
No region reached the level of significance in the direct contrast. No age differences were found.
No region reached the level of significance. A significant effect of age group was observed in the medial OFC ([oxy-Hb];
The correlational analysis with the affective and cognitive GEM scores revealed significant correlations with the parent-rated affective empathy measure only. Significant positive correlations were found for the non-verbal cartoon-modality in the medial OFC in contrast (1) ([Affective > Neutral]; [deoxy-Hb];
The present study investigated the neural correlates of affective and cognitive empathy in young children in orbitofrontal and posterior temporal regions. We measured hemodynamic responses of empathy processing in a non-verbal cartoon and a verbal story-listening task using fNIRS and observed activations related to empathy processing in medial and bilateral OFC for both types of stimuli.
Our results provide evidence for the hypothesis that empathy processing in young, healthy children requires a greater involvement of orbitofrontal brain regions, irrespective of whether the task elicits affective or cognitive empathy. As such, the present study extends recent findings from studies examining adult participants that also found orbitofrontal regions involved in empathy processing (Hynes et al.,
In line with our initial hypothesis, affective as well as cognitive empathy processing activates the OFC bilaterally. The occurrence of similar activation patterns for the two conditions is additionally supported by the finding that the direct (Affective > Cognitive) contrast showed no significant differences.
The role of the OFC has been examined by recent fMRI studies, investigating either affective (e.g., Decety et al.,
Only two fMRI studies, both on adults, were conducted that were comparable: Völlm et al. (
A direct comparison of the auditory and visual modality has so far not been conducted with young participants and it seems likely that their empathic processing might differ from that in adults. Since no additional activations in temporal regions were observed in the present study, differences between children's and adults’ processing of empathic stories seem to be associated with differences in the engagement of temporal regions, and not the OFC. Still, it should be noted that the present definition of the PTR and its approximate location does not fully overlap with the often reported TPJ area in adults’ cognitive empathy processing. The examined PTR cluster is located in large parts along the superior temporal sulcus. The latter has reciprocal connections to the OFC (Barbas,
The OFC is suggested to be a key region supporting social cognition in general: It was found to be critical for ToM-processing (Carrington and Bailey,
The observed involvement of the OFC in empathy processing is also in line with theories that propose a hierarchical structure of the prefrontal cortex, postulating more complex cognitive processes, the more anterior a region is located in the frontal lobe (Fuster,
It still remains an open question why other studies on the same issue did not find OFC activations for affective and cognitive empathy (see Hein and Singer,
Finally, the diversity of paradigms and materials may account for some of the variability in the results of different studies: Written scenarios or cartoons (Kobayashi et al.,
Only small differences are visible between affective and cognitive empathy processing in the present study and those did not survive the direct contrasting. fNIRS can only measure hemodynamic responses in the outer cortical regions. Thus, it is obvious that this method is not able to detect emotion-related differences in subcortical parts of the emotion processing circuits (Dolan,
We further observed an effect of children's age in medial OFC, related to affective empathy processing: Older children showed higher medial OFC activation for the direct (Affective empathy > Cognitive empathy) contrast than younger ones. We think that this main effect of age indicates a shift toward an involvement of additional medial parts of the anterior frontal lobe with older age in affective but not in cognitive empathy processing. This finding is supported by the neuroimaging literature on adults’ affective empathy processing, who additionally require medial frontal regions (Decety and Jackson,
Because Decety and Michalska (
Still, one might wonder why this age-effect was only found in the auditory condition. This finding suggests that visual and auditory processing of empathy stories in young children are qualitatively different due to their different everyday familiarity. We suggest this to result from a visual processing dominance in children. Children are probably more used to following visually guided cartoon stories than to listening mindfully to auditory empathy stories (e.g., Hayes and Birnbaum,
A second developmental effect was visible in affective empathy processing of auditory stimuli in the left IFG. As mentioned above, involvement of left IFG is often reported in adult studies on empathy processing and the MNS. These differences in the activation of the left IFG probably point to a similar age-dependent shift in affective empathy processing in older compared with younger children. Older children's processing of auditory affective empathy stories is associated with higher involvement of the left IFG. Thus, children seem to increase the use of the frontal MNS more with ongoing development.
A different view comes from semantic memory research. Left IFG has been shown to be more active in tasks requiring retrieval of semantic knowledge and verbal recoding (Thompson-Schill et al.,
Finally, an age-effect was observed for channel 17 [oxy-Hb], showing higher activation in left dlPFC for older children for affective empathic processing in the visual domain. Apart from a general discussion on the role of dlPFC in working memory and executive functions (Miller and Cohen,
Taken together, the age-effects observed in the present study are all related to affective empathy processing, thus indicating developmental changes in the affective empathy component in the age-group investigated. Future research might use the same design in a study on adults to further our knowledge of developmental differences between children and adults.
Apart from the finding of medial OFC involvement, no specific activations were found for the affective versus cognitive empathy comparisons. Also, no PTR cluster and no other channel in the temporal lobe became significantly activated. Temporal regions are discussed to be specifically activated for cognitive empathic processing in adults (Frith and Frith,
For the visual modality, correlations of the affective GEM scores with medial OFC activation were found, revealing a negative correlation with affective and cognitive empathic processing, whereas cognitive GEM scores did not correlate significantly with any activated brain region in the present study. These results lead to the question to what extent children who score high in affective GEM activate the medial OFC less for affective and for cognitive empathic processing.
As parent-rated GEM scores and age did not correlate in the present study, this effect cannot simply be attributed to age. The finding suggests that children who are more affectively empathic process affective and cognitive empathy stories differently in the medial OFC (whose activation was only found to be related with affective empathic processing). Although the particular correlations are negative, this result mirrors well the above findings which point to the close relationship between medial OFC and children's affective empathy processing. Here, less activation in the medial OFC is found for children who are more empathic. This rather paradoxical finding might indicate a shift of empathic processing away from anterior frontal regions in emphatic children, toward subcortical processing (as mirrored by the reported positive correlations in adult studies between empathic traits and anterior insula activation, e.g., Moriguchi et al.,
With the present study, we introduce the method of fNIRS to the field of neurodevelopmental studies on empathy processing, and we believe it is a valuable tool for research in this field. fNIRS has several advantages over other imaging methods such as fMRI or PET, first of all, that no fixation of the head is needed. The child can sit on a comfortable chair in front of a screen, communicate with supervisor and parents during preparation and, if necessary, also during the trials. The optodes can easily be prepared beforehand, thus the actual preparation is comfortable and not so time-consuming. Because of its low constraints on the experimental environment, fNIRS is a good tool to investigate higher cognition, whereas an MRI environment may impair children's concentration and speech perception (Hofmann et al.,
There are some limitations to our study. Both limitations are based on the fact that we employed a design that was applicable to young children, having in mind not to overtax the children. First of all, the application of a passive following paradigm in children does not allow to conclude that all children processed all stories deeply and with an intention to take the point of view of the main character which might have led to less activations in empathy processing regions. Secondly, one might ask whether the adult ratings to the empathy stories are also valid for children. Children's ratings are not yet available for the stimulus set and it is questionable to what extend young children are able to explicitly judge their empathic involvement – which is the reason why we had to base the study on adult rating data. Therefore, we cannot be certain, for example, whether the children processed all empathy stories in an affective manner or not. Still, given the post-experimental interviews, we believe, that the children processed the stories in the intended manner, and the high concordance of the results with that of previous adult studies seems to validate this assumption. Further studies are needed which directly address the differences between passively following and explicitly judging of empathy stories in young children.
Taken together, our findings provide evidence for higher medial and bilateral OFC activation in both, affective and cognitive empathy processing in a sample of young children 4–8 years of age. Thus, in a manner similar to what is known from adult OFC recruitment in complex social cognition tasks and empathy processing, orbitofrontal regions were involved in a task in which children passively followed empathic narratives – independently of whether these stories presented social situations where a character experiences affective outcomes of its own action or the plot required the mentalizing and prediction of further actions, and independently of whether these stories were presented visually or auditorily. Hence, our results support the idea that the OFC is a brain region associated with computing and evaluating predictions of other persons’ actions and the comparison of these predictions with subjective states across both affective and non-affective situations.
Furthermore, in contrast to our initial hypotheses, developmental changes with increased brain activation in older children were observed in affective empathy processing as compared to neutral stories in left dlPFC in the visual condition and left anterior IFG in the auditory condition, but no age-related effects were observed in cognitive empathy processing. In contrast, medial OFC showed a higher activation when directly contrasting affective and cognitive processing conditions. Thus, the results support the idea of medial OFC being especially engaged in socio-affective processing and a development of medial OFC functioning toward a higher involvement with older ages during childhood.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Tim steht vor einer Bude und schleckt sein Eis.
Ein Mann kommt den Weg entlang gelaufen.
Er übersieht den Jungen und rempelt ihn so an, dass Tim das Eis aus der Hand fällt.
Der Mann schenkt Tim ein neues Eis.
Tim is standing in front of an ice-cream booth and licks his ice-cream
A man comes walking along.
He overlooks the boy and bumps into him, so that the ice-cream falls down from Tim's hand.
The man buys a new ice-cream for Tim.
Lisa und Tom spielen zusammen auf dem Spielplatz und ihre Mutter schaut von einer Bank aus zu.
Tom steht vor der Rutsche, die Lisa gerade heruntergerutscht kommt.
Lisa rutscht Tom in den Rücken, beide fallen hin und weinen.
Die Mutter steht von der Bank auf und geht davon.
Lisa and Tom are playing together on the playground, their mother watches them from a bench.
Tom is standing in front of the slide, which Lisa is just sliding down.
Lisa slides into Tom's back, both of them fall down and start crying.
Their mother gets up from the bench and walks away.
Anna läuft zu einem Apfelbaum an dem viele äpfel hängen
Sie möchte einen Apfel pflücken aber kommt nicht dran
Sie holt sich eine Kiste und schiebt sie unter den Baum
Sie stellt sich auf die Kiste und pflückt einen Apfel
Anna walks towards an apple-tree full of apples.
She wants to pick an apple, but cannot reach any.
She fetches a box and puts it under the tree (gets places).
She steps up on the box and picks an apple
Jannis entdeckt im obersten Fach des Schranks seiner Eltern ein Geschenk.
Nach einigem überlegen geht ihm ein Licht auf, wie er wie er daran kommen könnte.
Er holt sich eine lange Leiter.
Jannis legt die Leiter auf den Boden und beginnt auf ihr zu balancieren
Jannis discovers a present in the top shelf of his parents’ closet.
After thinking a while, he gets an idea how to get it.
He fetches a long ladder.
Jannis puts the ladder on the ground and starts to walk on it.
Olli sieht eine Schaukel an einem Baum hängen
Er zieht die Schaukel zu sich
Er klettert auf den untersten Ast, damit er richtig Schwung holen kann
Mit Schwung fängt er an zu schaukeln
Olli sees a swing hanging on a tree.
He pulls the swing towards himself.
He climbs onto the lowest branch, to get a good start.
He begins to swing.
Der Vater zieht Jan auf dem Schlitten den Berg hinauf.
Die beide kommen oben an.
Der Vater setzt sich zu Jan auf den Schlitten.
Sie rodeln gemeinsam den Berg hinunter.
The father pulls Jan on the sleigh up the hill.
They arrive at the top of the mountain.
The father sits down on the sleigh with Jan.
They sled down the mountain together.
1left PTR [deoxy-Hb]: visual (Affective > Neutral) contrast:
2To further evaluate the age-related effect in [oxy-Hb] in contrast 3 (Affective empathy > Cognitive empathy)