Human Empathy Through the Lens of Social Neuroscience

Abstract

Empathy is the ability to experience and understand what others feel without confusion between oneself and others. Knowing what someone else is feeling plays a fundamental role in interpersonal interactions. In this paper, we articulate evidence from social psychology and cognitive neuroscience, and argue that empathy involves both emotion sharing (bottom-up information processing) and executive control to regulate and modulate this experience (top-down information processing), underpinned by specific and interacting neural systems. Furthermore, awareness of a distinction between the experiences of the self and others constitutes a crucial aspect of empathy. We discuss data from recent behavioral and functional neuroimaging studies with an emphasis on the perception of pain in others, and highlight the role of different neural mechanisms that underpin the experience of empathy, including emotion sharing, perspective taking, and emotion regulation.

Cited by papers we hold 10

• Is Empathy for Pain Unique in Its Neural Correlates? A Meta-Analysis of Neuroimaging Studies of Empathy · 2018
  No notice
• Examining the relationship between burnout and empathy in healthcare professionals: A systematic review · 2017
  No notice
• All for one: Contributions of age, socioeconomic factors, executive functioning and social cognition to moral reasoning in childhood. · 2016
  Not checked
• To be or not to be empathic: the combined role of empathic concern and perspective taking in understanding burnout in general practice · 2014
  No notice
• Autism, oxytocin and interoception · 2014
  No notice
• Inter-individual differences in empathy are reflected in human brain structure · 2012
  No notice
• Experience Modulates Vicarious Freezing in Rats: A Model for Empathy · 2011
  No notice
• The role of social cognition in decision making · 2008
  No notice
• The empathic brain and its dysfunction in psychiatric populations: implications for intervention across different clinical conditions · 2007
  No notice
• What Are You Feeling? Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to Assess the Modulation of Sensory and Affective Responses during Empathy for Pain · 2007
  No notice

Reads

A person counts once a day per paper. We keep no cookie and no address: a reader is a hash that changes every day. Any month under five reads shows no number.