Empathy is one such social-cognitive capacity that undergoes age-related change. C urrently, however, not well understood is the structural and functional neurocircuitry underlying age-related differences in empathy. This study aimed to delineate brain structural and functional networks that subserve affective empathic response in younger and older adults using a modified version of the Multifaceted Empathy Task to both positive and negative emotions. Combining multimodal neuroimaging with multivariate partial least square analysis resulted in two novel findings in older but not younger adults: (a) faster empathic responding to negative emotions was related to greater fractional anisotropy of the anterior cingulum and greater functional activity of the anterior cingulate network; (b) however, empathic responding to positive emotions was related to greater fractional anisotropy of the posterior cingulum and greater functional activity of the posterior cingulate network. Such differentiation of structural and functional networks might have critical implications for prosocial behavior and social connections among older adults.
Keywords: Multivariate analysis; aging; cingulum bundle; empathy; multimodal imaging; white matter.