Hierarchically Organized Mirroring Processes in Social Cognition: The Functional Neuroanatomy of Empathy (original) (raw)

Mirror neuron: a neurological approach to empathy

Neurobiology of human values, 2005

Humans are an exquisitely social species. Our survival and success depend critically on our ability to thrive in complex social situations. But how do we understand others? Which are the mechanisms underlying this capacity?

Mirror neurons and their function in cognitively understood empathy

Consciousness and Cognition, 2013

The current renewal of interest in empathy is closely connected to the recent neurobiological discovery of mirror neurons. Although the concept of empathy has been widely deployed, we shall focus upon one main psychological function it serves: enabling us to understand other peoples' intentions. In this essay we will draw on neuroscientific, psychological, and philosophical literature in order to investigate the relationships between mirror neurons and empathy as to intention understanding. Firstly, it will be explored whether mirror neurons are the neural basis of our empathic capacities: a vast array of empirical results appears to confirm this hypothesis. Secondly, the higher level capacity of reenactive empathy will be examined and the question will be addressed whether philosophical analysis alone is able to provide a foundation for this more abstract level of empathy. The conclusion will be drawn that both empirical evidence and philosophical analysis can jointly contribute to the clarification of the concept of empathy.

Imitation, empathy, and mirror neurons

Annual review of psychology, 2009

There is a convergence between cognitive models of imitation, constructs derived from social psychology studies on mimicry and empathy, and recent empirical findings from the neurosciences. The ideomotor framework of human actions assumes a common representational format for action and perception that facilitates imitation. Furthermore, the associative sequence learning model of imitation proposes that experience-based Hebbian learning forms links between sensory processing of the actions of others and motor plans. Social psychology studies have demonstrated that imitation and mimicry are pervasive, automatic, and facilitate empathy. Neuroscience investigations have demonstrated physiological mechanisms of mirroring at single-cell and neural-system levels that support the cognitive and social psychology constructs. Why were these neural mechanisms selected, and what is their adaptive advantage? Neural mirroring solves the "problem of other minds" (how we can access and understand the minds of others) and makes intersubjectivity possible, thus facilitating social behavior. 653 Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2009.60:653-670. Downloaded from arjournals.annualreviews.org by Hebrew University of Jerusalem on 12/29/08. For personal use only.

Imagining and Imaging the Social Brain: The Case of Mirror Neurons

Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 2016

In a contemporary setting in which all things “neuro” have great cultural sway, an analysis of the ways in which neuroscience is indebted to the methods and findings of the social sciences has received less attention. Indeed, in the new specialization of social neuroscience, neuroscientists now collaborate with contemporary psychologists and invoke historical psychological theories to help theorize empathy and social understanding. This article examines the overlap between psychological frameworks of social emotion and neuroscience in the case of mirror neurons, discovered in the 1990s. Some neuroscientists purport that mirror neurons underlie the social behaviours of imitation and empathy, and have found support for this view of theories of simulation and embodied cognition. They have also invoked pragmatic and phenomenological approaches to mind and behaviour dating back to the early 20th century. Neuroscientists have thus imported, adapted, and interpreted psychological models to...

The functional architecture of human empathy

Empathy accounts for the naturally occurring subjective experience of similarity between the feelings expressed by self and others without loosing sight of whose feelings belong to whom. Empathy involves not only the affective experience of the other person's actual or inferred emotional state but also some minimal recognition and understanding of another's emotional state. In light of multiple levels of analysis ranging from developmental psychology, social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical neuropsychology, this article proposes a model of empathy that involves parallel and distributed processing in a number of dissociable computational mechanisms. Shared neural representations, self-awareness, mental flexibility, and emotion regulation constitute the basic macrocomponents of empathy, which are underpinned by specific neural systems. This functional model may be used to make specific predictions about the various empathy deficits that can be encountered in different forms of social and neurological disorders.

The Social Neuroscience of Empathy

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2009

Empat hy is a complex psychological response in which observation, memory, knowledge, and reasoning are combined to yield insights into the thoughts and feelings of others . There is broad agreement about two primary components of empathy: (1) an affective response to another person, which may (but not always) entail sharing that person's emotional state; and (2) a cognitive capacity to take the other person's perspective (e.g., . Definitional variations on these general statements abound. However, virtually all empathy researchers agree that empathy requires making a link between the self and other, but without confusing the self and other. With this point in mind, our goal in this chapter is to bridge social psychological studies of empathy with findings from neuroscience in order to identify the fundamental neural mechanisms that could serve as the basis for empathy.

The role of shared neural activations, mirror neurons, and morality in empathy – A critical comment

Neuroscience Research, 2015

In the last decade, the phenomenon of empathy has received widespread attention by the field of social neuroscience. This has provided fresh insights for theoretical models of empathy, and substantially influenced the academic and public conceptions about this complex social skill. The present paper highlights three key issues which are often linked to empathy, but which at the same time might obscure our understanding of it. These issues are: (1) shared neural activations and whether these can be interpreted as evidence for simulation accounts of empathy; (2) the causal link of empathy to our presumed mirror neuron system; and (3) the question whether increasing empathy will result in better moral decisions and behaviors. The aim of our review is to provide the basis for critically evaluating our current understanding of empathy, and its public reception, and to inspire new research directions.

The Evolving Empathy : Hardwired Bases of Human and Non-Human Primate Empathy

2014

Empathy has always been hard to operationalize. A communication gap between psychologists and neurobiologists delayed the study of empathic processes for long, but in recent years, with the discovery of mirror neurons, with the finally found neurological substrate of the much discussed “embodiment of observed behaviours”, envisaged by psychophysiologists, a revolution is in the way we understand emotion. Neuroscientists are coming ever closer to social psychologists in finding the substrate for the proposed relations between gender, mimicry, emotional contagion and empathy. Furthermore, they are stumping on evidence of empathy in non-human animals. In this paper we describe different types and components of empathy, with a particular emphasis on the Perception-Action Model (Preston and de Waal, 2002), and overview the discovery of the mirror neurons and its implication to empathy and its biological evolution.