Impairment of prosocial sentiments is associated with frontopolar and septal damage in frontotemporal dementia

Jorge Moll, Roland Zahn, Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza, Ivanei E. Bramati, Frank Krueger, Bernardo Tura, Alyson L. Cavanagh, Jordan Grafman*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

116 Scopus citations

Abstract

Poets and philosophers have long acknowledged moral sentiments as key motivators of human social behavior. Prosocial sentiments, which include guilt, pity and embarrassment, enable us to care about others and to be concerned about our mistakes. Functional imaging studies have implicated frontopolar, ventromedial frontal and basal forebrain regions in the experience of prosocial sentiments. Patients with lesions of the frontopolar and ventromedial frontal areas were observed to behave inappropriately and less prosocially, which could be attributed to a generalized emotional blunting. Direct experimental evidence for brain regions distinctively associated with moral sentiment impairments is lacking, however. We investigated this issue in patients with the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia, a disorder in which early and selective impairments of social conduct are consistently observed. Using a novel moral sentiment task, we show that the degree of impairment of prosocial sentiments is associated with the degree of damage to frontopolar cortex and septal area, as assessed with 18-Fluoro-Deoxy-Glucose-Positron Emission Tomography, an established measure of neurodegenerative damage. This effect was dissociable from impairment of other-critical feelings (anger and disgust), which was in turn associated with dorsomedial prefrontal and amygdala dysfunction. Our findings suggest a critical role of the frontopolar cortex and septal region in enabling prosocial sentiments, a fundamental component of moral conscience.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1735-1742
Number of pages8
JournalNeuroimage
Volume54
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 15 2011

Funding

This study was supported by NINDS intramural funding to JG and in part by the D'Or Institute for Research and Education, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to JM, RO-S, IEB and BT. RZ was supported by a Stepping Stone Fellowship at The University of Manchester, UK. We thank Eric Wassermann for the neurological exams, Kris Knutson and Griselda Garrido for imaging analysis advice, Michael Tierney and Karen DeTucci for testing patients, and Vijeth Iyengar for help with data pre-processing and management.

Keywords

  • Amygdala
  • Emotion
  • Frontopolar cortex
  • Moral sentiment
  • Orbitofrontal cortex
  • Prefrontal cortex
  • Septal area
  • Subgenual

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Neurology
  • Cognitive Neuroscience

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