Human Empathy Through the Lens of Social Neuroscience

By Jean Decety, Claus Lamm. TheScientificWorldJournal, 2006

993 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b466111f5ea5d5fb82eeb77ff795d40c69d20892

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Citations in the corpus

The Role of the Right Temporoparietal Junction in Social Interaction: How Low-Level Computational Processes Contribute to Meta-Cognition (2007, background): “Both empathy and theory of mind involve an ability to simultaneously distinguish between different possible perspectives on the same situation (Decety and Jackson 2004; Decety and Lamm 2006).”
The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy (2017, background): “One significant problem with the widespread suggestion that empathy involves a sharing of affects (see also Decety and Lamm 2006, Preston 2007, Pfeifer and Dapretto 2009) is that people rarely define what they mean by sharing.”
The Social Neuroscience of Empathy (2009, background): “Decety and Lamm (2006), for example, proposed a model in which bottom-up (i.e., direct matching between perception and action) and top-down (i.e., regulation, contextual appraisal, and control) information processes are fundamentally intertwined in the generation and modulation of empathy.”
Does empathy predict (cyber) bullying perpetration, and how do age, gender and nationality affect this relationship? (2016, background): “…states; second, cognitive empathy requires more conscious deliberation, enables understanding of people's emotions and putting these into perspective, and may support strategic social interactions and communication (Decety & Jackson, 2004; Decety & Lamm, 2006; Hakansson & Montgomery, 2003).”
Theory of Mind and Empathic Explanations of Machiavellianism (2013, background): “Such processes are characteristic of nonconscious mimicry of facial expressions, posture, gestures, and mannerisms observed in self and others when we interact with them.”
Empathy, Connectedness and Organisation (2012, background): “Decety and Lamm (2006) claim that altruistic empathy is a striking quality that runs contrary to the Darwinian tradition of natural selection, and is evident in life beyond humanity.”
The neuropsychology of consumer behavior and marketing (2018, background): “Among other regions, the insula, inferior frontal gyrus (pars opercularis), temporal parietal junction, superior temporal sulcus, and amygdala have been implicated in mirror neuron activation (Dapretto et al., 2006; Decety & Lamm, 2006; van der Gaag, Minderaa, & Keysers, 2007).”
The Neural Substrate of Human Empathy: Effects of Perspective-taking and Cognitive Appraisal (2007, background): “It was thus important to demonstrate both the similarities in the neural networks underlying the sharing of pain with others and the specific mechanisms that permit distinguishing the self from others, which is critical for the experience of empathy (Decety & Hodges, 2006; Decety & Lamm, 2006; Dec”
On a Scale of State Empathy During Message Processing (2010, background): “…since there is strong empirical evidence that individuals tend to be empathic toward others’ pain, suffering, and distress (Decety & Jackson, 2006; Decety & Lamm, 2006; Preston & de Waal, 2002); (2) the perceived verisimilitude of the message, since it is a precedent of state empathy (Campbell…”
Meta-analytic evidence for common and distinct neural networks associated with directly experienced pain and empathy for pain (2011, neutral): “However, many models of empathy assume an important role of mimicry and emotional contagion and regard these two phenomena as interacting (see Singer and Lamm, 2009, for clarification of terms, and Decety and Lamm, 2006; Preston and de Waal, 2002).”
Physicians down-regulate their pain empathy response: An event-related brain potential study (2010, background): “The dynamics of this evoked response are consistent with the two-stage model of empathy for pain, as evidenced by clear demarcations in the time course, scalp distribution, and functional in aspects of time course, scalp distribution, and functional significance (Decety, 2007; Decety and Lamm, 2006;”
The Empathy Imbalance Hypothesis of Autism: A Theoretical Approach to Cognitive and Emotional Empathy in Autistic Development (2009, background): “Decety and Lamm (2006) pointed out that distractive strategies may be important for humans if the cost of empathizing is excessive.”
A Comparison of Preservice Teachers’ Responses to Cyber Versus Traditional Bullying Scenarios (2014, methodology): “We adopted this “other-oriented” (Decety & Lamm, 2006) conceptualization of empathy in the current study, that is, we regarded empathy as sympathetic, supportive feelings toward a victim of bullying.”
Empathic brain responses in insula are modulated by levels of alexithymia but not autism (2010, background): “2009), at least two different routes to the understanding of other minds can be distinguished: our ability to understand the abstract beliefs and intentions of others, which is referred to as Theory of Mind, cognitive perspective taking or mentalizing (Premack and Woodruff, 1978; Frith and Frith, 20”
Empathy, Teacher Dispositions, and Preparation for Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (2018, background): “…as a process of knowing is influenced by prior experiential knowledge of factors shaping the observation condition, previous interaction(s) with the target, and/ or exposure to texts, worlds, or spaces that in some way shape how the target is experiencing a circumstance (Decety & Lamm, 2006).”
Intrapsychic Correlates of Professional Quality of Life: Mindfulness, Empathy, and Emotional Separation (2010, background): “In a reciprocal loop, this meta-cognitive level of processing continues to receive information from bottom-up responses, and continues to provide top-down feedback to control responses (Decety and Lamm, 2006; Singer & Lamm, 2009).”