Empathy and compassion.

By Tania Singer, Olga M. Klimecki. Current Biology, 2014

1,019 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As humans we are a highly social species: in order to coordinate our joint actions and assure successful communication, we use language skills to explicitly convey information to each other, and social abilities such as empathy or perspective taking to infer another person's emotions and mental state. The human cognitive capacity to draw inferences about other peoples' beliefs, intentions and thoughts has been termed mentalizing, theory of mind or cognitive perspective taking. This capacity makes it possible, for instance, to understand that people may have views that differ from our own. Conversely, the capacity to share the feelings of others is called empathy. Empathy makes it possible to resonate with others' positive and negative feelings alike--we can thus feel happy when we vicariously share the joy of others and we can share the experience of suffering when we empathize with someone in pain. Importantly, in empathy one feels with someone, but one does not confuse oneself with the other; that is, one still knows that the emotion one resonates with is the emotion of another. If this self-other distinction is not present, we speak of emotion contagion, a precursor of empathy that is already present in babies.

Subfields: Psychiatry and Mental health, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5784339eed350d0084582843fdbd905d04ff6c40

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Citations in the corpus

Feelings for the Suffering of Others and the Environment (2016, background): “In fact, empathic concern is often used interchangeably with compassion (cf. Batson, 2009; Goetz et al., 2010; Singer & Klimecki, 2014).”
Addressing Empathic Failures (2015, background): “These component processes of empathy diverge along multiple dimensions, including subjective experience, behavior, and associated neural architecture (Davis, 1994; Singer & Klimecki, 2014; Zaki & Ochsner, in press).”
On the interaction of social affect and cognition: empathy, compassion and theory of mind (2018, positive): “In contrast to compassion, empathic distress, which is an alternative outcome of empathy, may be detrimental to the experiencer as well as to the suffering other [15,18].”
The neuroscience of empathy (2018, background): “Concerned, prosocial motivation itself is supported by a network that incorporates regions underlying goaldirected approach, such as the ventral tegmental area, subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, and striatum [35 ,37,38].”
Dissecting the social brain: Introducing the EmpaToM to reveal distinct neural networks and brain-behavior relations for empathy and Theory of Mind (2015, neutral): “others' sufferingmay also induce compassion, that is feelings ofwarmth and care and the wish to alleviate the other's suffering (Singer and Klimecki, 2014).”
Empathy, place and identity interactions for sustainability (2019, background): “Individuals’ relation to place, including their emotional attachments have, for example, explained how individuals adapt and mitigate environmental change (Singer and Klimecki, 2014; Butler et al., 2015; Marshall et al. 2012; Head et al. 2016).”
The Role of Empathy and Compassion in Conflict Resolution (2019, background): “Moreover, the cultivation of compassion increased positive emotions toward suffering strangers, as well as brain activations related to positive affect (Klimecki, 2015; Klimecki, Leiberg, Lamm, & Singer, 2013; Klimecki, Leiberg, Ricard, & Singer, 2014; Singer & Klimecki, 2014).”
Age-related neural dynamics of empathy in preschoolers: an EEG study with naturalistic viewing (2026, unknown): “Empathy, defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings and mental states of others, is a cornerstone of social development for individuals and fundamentally shapes human interaction (Decety and Jackson 2004, Singer and Klimecki 2014).”