Brain Struct Funct (2012) 217:783–796 tested whether a common set of brain areas might be implicated in all three of these elaborate social-cognitive skills. We addressed these questions by means of a quanti- tative meta-analysis on peak coordinates reported in func- tional neuroimaging studies on moral cognition, ToM, and empathy. Methods Data used for the meta-analysis We searched the PubMed database (http://www.pubmed. org) for fMRI and PET studies that investigated the neural correlates of moral cognition, ToM and empathy. Relevant papers were found by keyword search (search strings: ‘‘moral’’, ‘‘morality’’, ‘‘norm’’, ‘‘transgression’’, ‘‘viola- tion’’, ‘‘theory of mind’’, ‘‘mentalizing’’, ‘‘false belief’’, ‘‘perspective taking’’, ‘‘empathy’’, ‘‘empathic’’, ‘‘fMRI’’, ‘‘PET’’). Further studies were identiﬁed through review articles and reference tracing from the retrieved papers. Please note that in the context of ALE, the term ‘‘experi- ment’’ usually refers to any single (contrast) analysis on imaging data yielding localization information, while the term ‘‘study’’ usually refers to a scientiﬁc publication reporting one or more ‘‘experiments’’ (Laird et al. 2011; Eickhoff and Bzdok 2012). The inclusion criteria comprised full brain coverage as well as absence of pharmacological manipulations, brain lesions or mental/neurological disor- ders. Additionally, studies were only considered, if they reported results of whole-brain group analyses as coordi- nates corresponding to a standard reference space (Talai- rach/Tournoux, MNI). That is, experiments assessing neural effects in a priori deﬁned regions of interest were excluded. We included all eligible neuroimaging studies published up to and including the year 2010. The exhaustive literature search yielded in the moral cognition category a total of 67 experiments reporting 507 activation foci; in the ToM cat- egory a total of 68 experiments reporting 724 activation foci, and in the empathy category a total of 112 experiments reporting 1,376 activation foci. Methodologically equivalent to earlier ALE meta-anal- yses (Spreng et al. 2009; Lamm et al. 2011; Bzdok et al. 2011; Fusar-Poli et al. 2009; Mar 2011), study selection was grounded on the objective measure whether or not the authors claimed to have isolated brain activity that relates to moral cognition, ToM, or empathy. More speciﬁcally, we only included those neuroimaging studies into the ‘‘morality’’ category that required participants to make appropriateness judgments on actions of one individual towards others. In these studies, participants passively viewed or explicitly evaluated mainly textual, sometimes pictorial social scenarios with moral violations/dilemmas. 785 The target conditions were frequently contrasted with neutral or unpleasant social scenarios (see Supplementary Table 1 for detailed study descriptions). Furthermore, we only included those neuroimaging studies into the ‘‘ToM’’ category that required participants to adopt an intentional stance towards others, that is, predict their thoughts, intentions, and future actions. These studies mostly pre- sented cartoons and short narratives that necessitated understanding the beliefs of the acting characters. The target conditions were usually contrasted with non-social physical stories, which did not necessitate social perspec- tive-taking. Finally, we only included those neuroimaging studies into the ‘‘empathy’’ category that aimed at eliciting the conscious and isomorphic experience of somebody else’s affective state. Put differently, in these studies par- ticipants were supposed to know and ‘‘feel into’’ what another person was feeling. These studies employed mostly visual, sometimes textual or auditory stimuli that conveyed affect-laden social situations which participants watched passively or evaluated on various dimensions. Please note that we disregarded studies on empathy for pain because pain, although possessing an affective dimension, is not considered a classic emotion (Izard 1971; Ekman 1982). Rather, it is a bodily sensation mediated by distinct sensory receptors (Craig 2002; Saper 2000), and watching painful scenes does not induce isomorphic vicarious experiences (cf. Singer et al. 2004; Danziger et al. 2009). In particular, looking at a happy person usually elicits a sensation of happiness in the observer, yet watching a person in pain usually does not likewise evoke the physical experience of pain. Furthermore, we disre- garded studies in which participants were presented with emotion recognition tasks using static pictures of emotional facial expressions. That is because such tasks are probably too simple to reliably entail sharing others’ emotions and maintaining a self–other distinction, both widely regarded as hallmarks of empathy (Singer and Lamm 2009). Methodological foundation of activation likelihood estimation The reported coordinates were analyzed for topographic convergence using the revised ALE algorithm for coordi- nate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging results (Eickhoff et al. 2009; Turkeltaub et al. 2002; Laird et al. 2009a). The goal of coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging data is to identify brain areas where the reported foci of activation converge across published experiments. To this end, the meta-analysis determines if the clustering is sig- niﬁcantly higher than expected under the distribution of a random spatial association of results from the con- sidered experiments while acknowledging the spatial uncertainty associated with neuroimaging foci. 123