UCLA

Given previously established links with physical and psychosocial health, there has been renewed scientific interest in investigating the behavioral and neural development underlying prosocial behavior. It has been proposed that empathy is critical to the maturation of prosocial behavior during adolescence; however, there are missing gaps in our understanding of the behavioral and neural development underlying empathy in adolescence. Research is needed to clarify how processes constituting empathy, such as perspective-taking (understanding another’s emotional state), empathic concern (feeling another’s emotional state), and empathic responses such as personal distress, differ by age and relate to neural processing. This dissertation sought to examine age differences in the development of empathy and its associated neural activation during adolescence. Specifically, this dissertation had 3 primary aims 1) examine age-related differences in empathy (i.e., empathic concern, perspective-taking, personal distress) during adolescence, 2) investigate age-differences in neural activation among brain regions linked with pain processing, social cognition, and emotion regulation that are associated with empathy, and 3) assess the moderating role of brain regions linked with emotion regulation in the association between personal distress and prosocial behaviors. This research was accomplished by examining a sample (N = 147) of human adolescent responses to a validated empathy task that youth (aged 11-17 years old) completed while undergoing a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan. Findings from this dissertation demonstrated age-differences in self-reported state empathy, but not trait empathy, as a function of gender. Neuroimaging findings did not replicate the age by gender association in empathy. Youth, irrespective of age and gender, showed positive neural activation to empathy in the bilateral anterior insula, dACC, dmPFC, and vlPFC, intimating the involvement of brain regions linked with pain processing, social cognition, and emotion regulation in empathy during adolescence. While the neural correlates of empathic concern and perspective-taking were not as clear, there was evidence of an association between lower personal distress and higher activation in the dlPFC, vlPFC, and OFC. Furthermore, preliminary evidence emerged to suggest that the bilateral OFC moderates the association between personal distress and prosocial behavior. Suggestions for future research and implications for behavioral interventions are discussed.