Review articleImaging empathy and prosocial emotions
Section snippets
Empathy – a multi-faceted construct
While many different definitions of empathy exist [1][1 for a review], the one proposed in [2] highlights several aspects on which we will focus on in this paper, which are affect sharing, mentalizing, self-other distinction, sympathy and compassion, and prosocial behavior. More specifically, according to this definition, empathy encompasses the isomorphic sharing of the affective state of another person (affect sharing); which can be triggered by direct observation, but also the mere
Affect sharing and “shared representations”
A great deal of neuroscientific research on empathy has focused on affect sharing. One influential view, the so-called “shared representations account of empathy”, suggests that empathy for a certain emotion engages neural processes that also underpin the first-hand experience of that emotion [6], [7]. This account was initially fueled by the robust finding that empathy for pain activates mid-cingulate and anterior insular cortices – i.e., areas that are also activated when pain is experienced
Self-other distinction
Self-other distinction is important to avoid that our feelings bias how accurately we share and understand another person’s affective state [32]. A lack of self-other distinction can have deleterious effects on prosocial behavior, as its failure may increase personal distress, a self-related aversive response detracting the focus on our partner’s suffering towards our own distress and its regulation [3]. One area with which self-other distinction has consistently been associated with is the
Sympathy and compassion
On a conceptual level, empathy and sympathy (or the related terms of care and compassion) should be regarded as distinct phenomena [see 4 for in-depth discussion]. The requirement of this distinction has recently become obvious again in a controversy on how empathy is related to morality, which may partially be resolved by differences in the use of the terms “empathy” and “compassion” by different scholars [13], [41], [42]. Based on neural data, we have been gaining an increasingly detailed
Prosocial behavior
What motivates prosocial behavior certainly bears the strongest potential implications that neuroscientific research on social emotions might have. After all, we do not only want to know what makes us share and understand the feelings of others, but also how this motivates us to behave towards others. One particularly interesting trend in the literature is the use of computational models to formally explain behavior [52], [53], [54]. For instance, [52] modelled fMRI data during reinforcement
Conclusion
Empathy is a highly complex and multi-faceted phenomenon that has fascinated scholars of various disciplines for centuries. It also attracts enormous interest by the general public, due to the implications it may have to address the major societal and political challenges we are currently facing. While having provided some major first insights, the neuroscientific investigation of this phenomenon is still in its infancy. By focusing on the many facets of empathy and its effects on social
Acknowledgments
The authors received financial support from the Austrian Science Fund [grant number P29150], and the Federal Ministry of Science, Research & Economy [grant name: “Interdisciplinary Translational Brain Research Cluster with Highfield MR”].
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