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

Empathy and morality: Integrating social and neuroscience approaches

2009

Philosophers and psychologists have long debated the nature of empathy (eg, Batson, 1991; Eisenberg, 2000; Ickes, 2003; Thompson, 2001), and whether the capacity to share and understand other people's emotions sets humans apart from other species (eg, de Waal, 2005). Here, we consider empathy as a construct accounting for a sense of similarity in feelings experienced by the self and the other, without confusion between the two individuals (Decety & Jackson, 2004; Decety & Lamm, 2006)

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.

A social-neuroscience perspective on empathy

2006

Abstract In recent years, abundant evidence from behavioral and cognitive studies and functional-imaging experiments has indicated that individuals come to understand the emotional and affective states expressed by others with the help of the neural architecture that produces such states in themselves. Such a mechanism gives rise to shared representations, which constitutes one important aspect of empathy, although not the sole one.

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 Social Brain and the Myth of Empathy

Science in Context, 2012

ArgumentNeuroscience research has created multiple versions of the human brain. The “social brain” is one version and it is the subject of this paper. Most image-based research in the field of social neuroscience is task-driven: the brain is asked to respond to a cognitive (perceptual) stimulus. The tasks are derived from theories, operational models, and back-stories now circulating in social neuroscience. The social brain comes with a distinctive back-story, an evolutionary history organized around three, interconnected themes: mind-reading, empathy, and the emergence of self-consciousness. This paper focuses on how empathy has been incorporated into the social brain and redefined via parallel research streams, employing a shared, imaging technology. The concluding section describes how these developments can be understood as signaling the emergence of a new version of human nature and the unconscious. My argument is not that empathy in the social brain is a myth, but rather that ...

How the social brain experiences empathy: Summary of a gathering

Social Neuroscience, 2010

Explaining how, and even why, the social brain experiences empathy is a complex integrative endeavor that has been explored by scientists of several disciplines working with both animal and human subjects. Current thoughts on empathy and its connection to behavior—prosocial, altruistic, and cruel alike—were explored by scholars in the fields of biology, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology at a conference in Chicago. The speakers' individually unique perspectives merged to provide an inclusive overview of the biological basis of, and cultural influences upon, empathy. The nature of empathy in nonhuman animals, the endocrine requirements for empathy, the effects of empathy on moral behavior, the social nature of pain, the relation between empathy and altruism, the ethnography of empathy, and empathy in the medical setting were discussed. The interdisciplinary nature of the conference demonstrated the advantages of communicating findings across fields while also delineating the difficulties that can stem from the existence of multiple approaches to, and definitions of, empathy. Future progress will be aided by working toward common definitions for empathy, sympathy, altruism, and so on, in concert with cross-disciplinary dialogues that allow practitioners of each discipline to be informed by paradigms and findings from complementary disciplines.

A social cognitive neuroscience model of human empathy

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.

Empathy: A social cognitive neuroscience approach

Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2009

There has been recent widespread interest in the neural underpinnings of the experience of empathy. In this review, we take a social cognitive neuroscience approach to understanding the existing literature on the neuroscience of empathy. A growing body of work suggests that we come to understand and share in the experiences of others by commonly recruiting the same neural structures both during our own experience and while observing others undergoing the same experience. This literature supports a simulation ...