39 Empathic Abilities of Individuals with Agenesis of the Corpus Callosum

Abstract

Objective:

Previous research suggests that individuals with isolated Agenesis of the Corpus Callosum (AgCC) have cognitive and psychosocial deficits including that of complex processing of emotions (Anderson et al., 2017) and their ability to verbally express emotional experiences (Paul et al., 2021). Additionally, research suggests individuals with AgCC show impaired recognition of the emotions of others (Symington et al., 2010), as well as diminished ability to infer and describe the emotions of others (Renteria-Vazquez et al., 2022; Turk et al., 2010). However, the nature of the empathic abilities of individuals with AgCC remains unclear in empirical research. Capacity for empathetic feelings and situational recognition in persons with AgCC were tested using the Multifaceted Empathy Test [MET] (Foell et al., 2018). We hypothesized that individuals with AgCC would have lower abilities for both cognitive and affective empathy than neurotypical controls.

Participants and Methods:

Results from 50 neurotypical control participants recruited from MTurk Cloud were compared to responses from 19 AgCC participants with normal-range FSIQ (>80) drawn from the individuals with AgCC involved with the Human Brain and Cognition Lab at the Travis Research Institute. The research was completed through an online version of the MET. The MET uses a series of photographs of individuals displaying an emotion. To measure cognitive empathy, the participants are asked to pick the correct emotion being displayed with three distractors for each item. To measure affective empathy, they are then asked on a sliding scale, “how much do you empathize with the person shown” (1 = Not at all, 7 = Very much).

Results:

Results of a MANOVA showed a trend for a significant overall difference between individuals with AgCC and controls for empathic abilities F(1, 67) = 2.59, p-value = .082, with persons with AgCC showing less empathy overall. Follow-up one-way ANOVAs showed that individuals with AgCC scored significantly lower in cognitive empathy F(1, 67) = 4.63, p-value = .035, ηp2 = .065; however, affective empathy was not significantly different between groups F(1, 67) = .537, p-value = .466, ηp2 = .008.

Conclusions:

Results suggest that adults with AgCC have a diminished ability to give cognitive labels to the emotional states of others compared to neurotypical controls. However, contrary to our hypothesis, participants with AgCC had affective responses to the pictures of the emotional states of others which were similar to neurotypical controls. Recent research has shown that individuals with AgCC have difficulty inferring and elaborating on the more complex cognitive, social, and emotional aspects of simple animations (Renteria-Vazquez et al., 2022; Turk et al., 2010). Cognitive empathy would require this form of elaborative thinking, even when affective empathy is normal. Similarly, Paul et al. (2021) described alexithymia in persons with AgCC as difficulty in expressing emotions linguistically, but found similar endorsements of emotional experience when compared to neurotypical controls. This study provides further evidence to suggest the corpus callosum facilitates the ability to cognitively label emotions but not necessarily the ability to experience emotions affectively.