Neural Mechanisms Underlying Empathy During Alcohol Abstinence: Evidence from Connectome-Based Modeling

Abstract Empathy impairments have been linked to alcohol dependency, even during abstinent periods. Nonetheless, the neural underpinnings of abstinence-induced deficits in empathy remain unclear. In this study, to predict the empathy capability of abstinent alcoholics (n = 47) versus healthy controls (n = 59), we employed connectome-based predictive modeling (CPM) by using whole brain resting-state functional connectivity (rs-FC). In addition, the generalizability of the predictive model (i.e., one group treated as a training dataset and another one treated as a test dataset) was performed to determine whether healthy controls and abstinent alcoholics share common neural fingerprints underlying empathy. Although no comparable predictive models were observed in the abstinence group, our results showed that individual empathy scores in the healthy group can be reliably predicted by functional connectivity from the default mode network (DMN) to the sensorimotor network (SMN), the occipital network, and the cingulo-opercular network (CON). Furthermore, the identified connectivity fingerprints of healthy controls could be generalized to predict empathy in the abstinence group. These findings indicate that neural circuits accounting for empathy may be disrupted by alcohol use and the impaired degree varies greatly among alcohol abstinent individuals.