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The Neural Correlates of Empathy: Experience, Automaticity, and Prosocial Behavior
Abstract
Empathy is a critical aspect of human emotion that influences the behavior of individuals as well as the functioning of society. Although empathy is fundamentally a subjective experience, no studies have yet examined the neural correlates of the self-reported experience of empathy. Furthermore, although behavioral research has linked empathy to prosocial behavior, no work has yet connected empathy-related neural activity to everyday, real-world helping behavior. Lastly, the widespread assumption that empathy is an automatic experience remains largely untested. It is also unknown whether differences in trait empathy reflect either variability in the automaticity of empathic responses or the capacity to feel empathy. In this study, 32 participants completed a diary study of helping behavior followed by an fMRI session, assessing empathic responses to sad images under three conditions: watching naturally, under cognitive load, and while empathizing. Across conditions, higher levels of self-reported experienced empathy were associated with greater activity in medial PFC (MPFC). Activity in MPFC was also correlated with daily helping behavior. Self-report of empathic experience and activity in empathy-related areas, notably MPFC, were higher in the empathize condition than in the load condition, suggesting that empathy is not a fully automatic experience. Additionally, high trait empathy participants displayed greater experienced empathy and stronger MPFC responses than low trait empathy individuals under cognitive load, suggesting that empathy is more automatic for individuals high in trait empathy. These results underline the critical role that MPFC plays in the instantiation of empathic experience and consequent behavior.
Supplementary resource (1)
... Adopting the perspective of elderly individuals decreases stereotypes related to age (Galinsky & Moskowitz 2000). Asking to empathise with a sad situation was found to increase the affective response to a target person (Rameson, Morelli & Lieberman 2012). In these three examples, empathy was defined as perspectivetaking. ...
... For example, in an fMRI study, participants read a contextual sentence depicting a sad situation, followed by photos of a target person in that situation. Participants who were asked to empathise showed stronger neural responses in empathy-associated brain areas (Rameson et al. 2012). Batson et al. (1997b) created three different instructions to elicit three different degrees of perspective-taking in listeners of a broadcast. ...
... 711). Lastly, when Rameson et al. (2012) showed the contextual sentences to the participants, they were asked to 'take each target's perspective and imagine how he or she felt about the situation and how it affected his or her life' (p. 238). ...
Empathy is argued to be a key factor for a successful design discussion. However, such causality cannot be empirically proven based on how empathy is currently defined in design community. Empathy is used as an umbrella construct, broad and encompassing of diverse phenomena, making it difficult to quantify. We suggest improving such a situation by introducing a definition of empathy based on psychology literature, which provides structure and guidance for studying the role of empathy in design. We first break empathy to components. Then, we review empathy as used in design. Finally, we synthetize the reviewed material. From this synthesis, we conclude that empathy in design shares several key components of empathy in psychology; particularly with state influences, top-down control process and emotional stimuli. These are present in design methods although they have not been studied using such terms. Incorporating psychological components of empathy into design can help conceptualising empathy from a different angle, thus opening interesting new avenues for future research. We hope that our treatment provides present and future designers with some useful guidance.
... However, the mere presence and even the perception of emotional information does not necessarily imply that empathizing will take place (Hofelich & Preston, 2012;Morelli & Lieberman, 2013;Rameson & Lieberman, 2012;Zaki, 2014). Observers' subjective experience of empathy is reduced when they perceive emotional information while simultaneously performing a cognitive load task, and this effect is associated with diminished activity in empathy and social-cognition-related brain regions (Morelli & Lieberman, 2013;Rameson & Lieberman, 2012). ...
... However, the mere presence and even the perception of emotional information does not necessarily imply that empathizing will take place (Hofelich & Preston, 2012;Morelli & Lieberman, 2013;Rameson & Lieberman, 2012;Zaki, 2014). Observers' subjective experience of empathy is reduced when they perceive emotional information while simultaneously performing a cognitive load task, and this effect is associated with diminished activity in empathy and social-cognition-related brain regions (Morelli & Lieberman, 2013;Rameson & Lieberman, 2012). The display of mimicry -a supposedly automatic behavioral reaction associated with the self-reported affective component of empathy (Holland et al., 2021) -also seems to depend at least in part on the allocation of attention to an emotional stimulus (Hofelich & Preston, 2012). ...
... However, in the absence of an intrinsic motivation to empathize, the value of the act of empathizing will be strongly determined by immediate situational factors, such as emotional salience (Balconi & Bortolotti, 2014), effort, and potential rewards (Cameron et al., 2019). In a study by Rameson and Lieberman (2012), high and low trait individuals did not differ in their neural responses when they were told to passively view or when they were instructed to empathize with a depicted person after they had received emotional information about them. However, when participants had to memorize an 8-digit number while viewing images in a cognitive load condition, individuals with high trait empathy displayed stronger neural responses in empathy-related circuits than low trait empathy individuals. ...
Previous studies have shown that situational factors like emotional salience are associated with higher subjective levels of state empathy. The present eye-tracking study explored whether gaze behavior varies as a function of emotional salience between individuals with low and high self-reported trait empathy. In a between-subjects design, we presented three social scene images in the context of different emotion conditions (Scene 1: neutral versus positive; Scene 2: neutral versus negative; Scene 3: positive versus negative) and assessed the dwell times of individuals with low versus high self-reported empathy (measured with the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire; TEQ). Analyses revealed that whereas low- and high-TEQ participants differed in their gaze behavior after receiving neutral information, they did not differ after receiving positive or negative information. Our preliminary results suggest that gaze behavior may be more indicative of self-reported trait empathy in situations with low emotional salience than in situations with high emotional salience.
... In addition, empathy has been found to induce prosocial behaviors in both rats [24] and human beings [29]. Rameson, Morelli, and Lieberman (2012) found that empathy was associated with greater activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which was associated with more prosocial behaviors [30]. In particular, Schultz (2002) found that participants who were asked to adopt the perspective of an animal reported more biosphere-oriented environmental concerns than did participants in the control condition [31]. ...
... In addition, empathy has been found to induce prosocial behaviors in both rats [24] and human beings [29]. Rameson, Morelli, and Lieberman (2012) found that empathy was associated with greater activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which was associated with more prosocial behaviors [30]. In particular, Schultz (2002) found that participants who were asked to adopt the perspective of an animal reported more biosphere-oriented environmental concerns than did participants in the control condition [31]. ...
... At the individual level, we identified empathy as a mechanism that explains the relationship between infectious disease vulnerability and pro-environmental behaviors: infectious disease vulnerability induces empathy, which in turn encourages pro-environmental behaviors. As previous research has suggested, empathy is an affective state that promotes prosocial behaviors [30], such as pro-environmental behaviors [32]. ...
Environmental problems, such as climate change, pollution, and environmental degradation, are important contributors to the spread of infectious diseases, such as COVID-19 and SARS. For instance, a greater concentration of ambient NO2 was associated with faster transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19. However, it remains unclear whether outbreaks of infectious diseases arouse individuals’ concern on the need to protect the environment and therefore promote more pro-environmental behaviors. To this end, we examined the relationship between infectious disease vulnerability and pro-environmental behaviors using data from a cross-societal survey (N = 53 societies) and an experiment (N = 214 individuals). At both the societal and the individual levels, infectious disease vulnerability increased pro-environmental behaviors. At the societal level, this relationship was mediated by citizens’ level of environmental concern. At the individual level, the relationship was mediated by empathy. The findings show that infectious disease vulnerability is conducive to pro-environmental behaviors.
... Similarly, fMRI studies identified the activation of distinct brain areas in limbic system [anterior insula (AI) and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC)] and the medial prefrontal cortex in empathic-inducing situations. According to these results, the aforementioned regions showed stronger activity in empathicinducing conditions compared with control conditions (Rameson et al., 2012;Morelli et al., 2014) suggesting that empathy is an integration of bottom-up automatic and top-down cognitive responses. Following the results of these studies (see Cuff et al., 2016, for review), the current paper defines empathy as a multidimensional concept consisting of three distinct, but interrelated, components, namely, empathic concern, personal distress, and perspective taking (Davis, 1983). ...
... Most of us have heard the phrase, "I've been there too" referring to undesirable experiences, such as grief. The literature suggests that sharing similar painful experiences is a predictor of empathic responsiveness (Batson et al., 1996;Eklund et al., 2009;Preis and Kroener-Herwig, 2012). For example, Barnett et al. (1987) investigated the association between empathy and similarity by asking participants to listen to a conversation between a rape victim and her therapist. ...
... For the region-specific analyses, Fp1, Fp2, Fz, F7, F3, F4, and F4 were included. We intended to focus on the frontal regions since previous studies have shown that activity in the regions was significantly associated with empathic responses and pain perception (Rameson et al., 2012;Morelli et al., 2014). These seven electrodes are associated with the frontal regions (Minnerly et al., 2019) and were used as the foci of statistical analyses. ...
Previous research suggests that prior experience of pain affects the expression of empathy. However, most of these studies attended to physical pain despite evidence indicating that other forms of pain may also affect brain activity and emotional states in similar ways. To address this limitation, we compared empathic responses of 33 participants, some of whom had experienced a personal loss, across three conditions: observing strangers in physical pain, psychological pain, and a non-painful condition. We also examined the effect of presence of prior painful experience on empathic reactions. In addition, we examined the stimulation type, prior experience, and ERPs in the early Late Positive Potential (300–550 ms), late Late Positive Potential (550–800 ms), and very late Late Positive Potential (VLLPP; 800–1,050 ms) time windows. Behavioral data indicated that participants who had personally experienced a loss scored significantly higher on perspective taking in the psychological-pain condition. ERP results also indicated significantly lower intensity in Fp2, an electrode in the prefrontal region, within VLLPP time window for participants experiencing a loss in the psychological-pain condition. The results of both behavioral and ERP analysis indicated that prior experience of psychological pain is related to cognitive empathy, but not affective empathy. The implication of these findings for research on empathy, for the study of psychological pain, and the moderating influence of prior painful experiences are discussed.
... Some scholars have proposed a distinction between the ability and the propensity to be empathic to account for inter and intra-individual variability in empathy (e.g., Keysers & Gazzola, 2014;Rameson et al., 2012). The ability of a person to be empathic depicts the maximum level of empathy that an individual is theoretically capable of. ...
... One's empathy also varies according to contextual, motivational and attentional factors of a given situation (Keysers & Gazzola, 2014;Morelli & Lieberman, 2013;Rameson et al., 2012;Zaki, 2014). Allocating attentional resources to others' emotions is suggested to be the first step towards an empathic cascade (Kang et al., 2017). ...
... A useful way of manipulating an individual's attentional resources comes from giving specific instructions to participants, encouraging them -or not -to actively empathize with relevant stimuli which could lead to behavioural and cerebral modulations of one's empathy. For instance, an explicit instruction to actively empathize with the target could increase the attention given to a task, accentuate the mobilization of cognitive resources, and thus improve empathic responses behaviourally (e.g., Batson, 1991;Davis et al., 1996;Drayton et al., 2018 ;Rameson et al., 2012;Sheng & Han, 2012;Sierksma et al., 2015) and cerebrally (e.g., Meffert et al., 2013). For example, an instruction encouraging empathy or perspective-taking would reduce racial bias in empathy for pain (Drwecki et al., 2011;Sheng & Han, 2012), strengthen response facilitation after pain observation (Galang & Obhi, 2019), enhance eye gaze duration for painful facial expressions (Pilch et al., 2020) and normalize the cerebral activation of psychopathic offenders while viewing video clips depicting scenarios of emotional hand interactions (Meffert et al., 2013). ...
Empathy, a core process for social interactions, is the capacity to understand and share others’ mental states and emotions. Each individual is thought to have a maximum level of empathy (empathic ability) and a spontaneous tendency to express it (empathic propensity), which can be affected by multiple factors. Two within-subject studies were conducted to assess the malleability of empathy by modulating contextual factors and measuring their interaction with psychological characteristics. In Study 1, 59 healthy adults evaluated their empathy for people showing facial expressions of pain following different instructions: Passive Observation and Instruction to Actively Empathize. In Study 2, 56 healthy adults performed a similar task under two conditions: Passive Observation and Observation under a Cognitive Load. The results revealed that empathy was significantly increased in the actively empathizing condition (Study 1) and under a cognitive load, but more importantly for men (Study 2). The level of change between the two conditions was associated with self-reported empathy, autistic, alexithymia and psychopathic traits (Study 1), as well as with working memory capacities and the level of empathy reported in the passive observation condition (Study 2). These findings suggest that an instruction to actively empathize and, surprisingly, a cognitive load can both increase empathy, but not for the same individuals. An instruction to actively empathize seems to increase empathy for individuals with good empathic dispositions, while a cognitive load enhances empathy in people for which empathic propensity is sub-optimal.
... Neuroimaging studies also support the involvement of affective and cognitive processes in empathic responsiveness by showing different temporal activations and neural pathways in the observer's brain (Decety & Hodges, 2006;Fan & Han, 2008;Rameson et al., 2012). More convincing evidence regarding affective and cognitive empathy comes from EEG studies (e.g., Fan & Han, 2008;Yaghoubi Jami et al., 2021b). ...
... This study supported the integration of affective and cognitive processes in empathic behavior, suggesting empathy is a multidimensional construct. Activation of distinct brain areas was also found in fMRI studies (Morelli et al., 2011;Rameson et al., 2012;cf. Yaghoubi Jami et al., 2021b). ...
Using a scoping review technique, we provide a comprehensive overview of empathy definitions by highlighting the multidimensional nature of empathy. Drawing from multiple lines of research on empathy, we underscore the role of culture in researching empathy and highlight the strengths and weaknesses of existing research on empathy and culture. In general, this review article supports the importance of theorizing empathy and culture as multidimensional concepts. The review article also further identifies an urgent need for reaching a consensus for defining empathy and using that definition in future research on empathy, regardless of the discipline or field (i.e., psychology, education, social science, health, management, etc.). We conclude that empathy is a multidimensional construct that is not only possessed but is also acquired and needs to be studied based on surrounding factors such as individual (e.g., empathizer’s profile and empathizee’s profile, similar experiences) and societal factors (e.g., cultural norms, group standards).
... Indeed, several prior studies have considered links between trait-level measures of empathy and neural activation in the context of empathy tasks (e.g., Bufalari & Ionta, 2013;Lockwood et al., 2015;Masten et al., 2011;Rameson et al., 2012). For example, Rameson et al. (2012) found that individuals with higher state-level empathy-based on selfreport empathy diary entries that participants completed each day for 2 weeks-also had higher trait-level empathy and stronger mPFC recruitment when viewing sad images than did participants with lower state-level empathy. ...
... Indeed, several prior studies have considered links between trait-level measures of empathy and neural activation in the context of empathy tasks (e.g., Bufalari & Ionta, 2013;Lockwood et al., 2015;Masten et al., 2011;Rameson et al., 2012). For example, Rameson et al. (2012) found that individuals with higher state-level empathy-based on selfreport empathy diary entries that participants completed each day for 2 weeks-also had higher trait-level empathy and stronger mPFC recruitment when viewing sad images than did participants with lower state-level empathy. Thus, although our fMRI movie-watching task likely assesses state-level empathy processes, whereas the dispositional and parental empathy measures (IRI and PEM, respectively) are more closely aligned with trait-level characteristics, it is likely that there is some degree of overlap given research indicating correspondence between the two. ...
Caregivers who are higher in dispositional empathy tend to have children with better developmental outcomes; however, few studies have considered the role of child‐directed (i.e., “parental”) empathy, which may be relevant for the caregiver–child relationship. We hypothesized that mothers’ parental empathy during their child's infancy will be a stronger predictor of their child's social‐emotional functioning as a toddler than will mothers’ dispositional empathy. We further explored whether parental and dispositional empathy have shared or distinct patterns of neural activation during a social‐cognitive movie‐watching task. In 118 mother–infant dyads, greater parental empathy assessed when infants were 6 months old was associated with more social‐emotional competencies and fewer problems in the children 1 year later, even after adjusting for dispositional empathy. In contrast, dispositional empathy was not associated with child functioning when controlling for parental empathy. In a subset of 20 mothers, insula activation was positively associated with specific facets of both dispositional and parental empathy, whereas right temporoparietal junction activation was associated only with parental empathy. Thus, dispositional and parental empathy appear to be dissociable by both brain and behavioral metrics. Parental empathy may be a viable target for interventions, especially for toddlers at risk for developing social‐emotional difficulties.
... Participants completed surveys to assess demographics and social behaviors as controls. Another control measures is trait empathy (Interpersonal Reactivity Index, IRI; Davis, 1983) that can affect prosocial behaviors (Rameson et al., 2012). A standard 5 question assessment captured satisfaction with life (SWL; Diener et al., 1985) and in order to examine if religion affected prosocial behaviors and SWL, the 10 question religious commitment inventory was used to assess religious activity (RCI; Worthington et al., 2003). ...
... This dispositional effect partially dampens the age effect on OT from the prime revealing a trait-state interaction that influences the acute donation decision. The "high oxytocin responder" effect has been found for other stimuli and behaviors (Rameson et al., 2012;Procyshyn et al., 2020) and has been previously reported for the video used here (Barraza and Zak, 2009). Nevertheless, the positive age gradient for age on donations was maintained for both low and high OT responders. ...
Helping behaviors and life satisfaction generally increase after middle-age. Identifying the neural substrates of prosocial behaviors in older adults may offer additional insights into these changes over the lifespan. The present study examines the endogenous release of the neuromodulator oxytocin (OT) in participants aged 18–99 and its relationship to prosocial behaviors. OT has been shown to influence trust, altruism, charity, and generosity, yet the effect of age on OT release has not been well-established. Blood samples before and after a video stimulus were obtained from 103 participants in order to examine the impact of OT on prosocial behaviors. We found that OT release following a social prime increased with age (r = 0.49, p = 0.001) and that OT moderated the relationship between age and donations to charity. We tested for robustness by examining three additional prosocial behaviors, money and goods donated to charity during the past year and social-sector volunteering. OT moderated the impact of age on all three prosocial behaviors (ps < 0.05). The analysis also showed that participants’ change in OT was positively associated with satisfaction with life (p = 0.04), empathic concern (p = 0.015), dispositional gratitude (p = 0.019), and religious commitment (p = 0.001). Our findings indicate that the neural chemistry that helps sustain social relationships and live a fulfilled life appear to strengthen with age.
... It has been found that the mPFC contributes to encoding subjective value of music [4,10]. This evaluation process might be linked to mPFC's functions of emotion awareness and affective empathy [11][12][13]. During exposure to sad music, compared to happy music, the dorsal and ventral clusters in the mPFC were found to have significantly higher centrality values (i.e., higher importance of network nodes) [8]. ...
... The mPFC is known to be engaged in social-emotional processing of information about the self [11,12] and empathy [13]. In the current study, the mPFC showed increased connectivity with several subcortical regions for the breakup songs versus rebellious songs, including the thalamus, amygdala, and caudate. ...
Song appreciation involves a broad range of mental processes, and different neural networks may be activated by different song types. The aim of the present study was to show differential functional connectivity of the prefrontal cortices while listening to breakup and rebellious songs. Breakup songs describe romance and longing, whereas rebellious songs convey criticism of conventional ideas or socio-cultural norms. We hypothesized that the medial and lateral prefrontal cortices may interact with different brain regions in response to these two song types. The functional magnetic resonance imaging data of fifteen participants were collected while they were listening to two complete breakup songs and two complete rebellious songs currently popular in Taiwan. The results showed that listening to the breakup songs, compared to the rebellious songs, enhanced the coupling between the medial prefrontal cortex and several emotion-related regions, including the thalamus, caudate, amygdala, hippocampus, and right inferior frontal gyrus. This coupling may reflect the neural processes of pain empathy, reward processing, compassion, and reappraisal in response to longing and sorrow expressed by the breakup songs. Compared to the breakup songs, listening to the rebellious songs was associated with enhanced coupling between subregions in the prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices. These areas might work in concert to support re-evaluation of conventional ideas or socio-cultural norms as suggested by the rebellious songs. This study advanced our understanding of the integration of brain functions while processing complex information.
... Second, rmPFC activity has been associated with normcompliant or socially desirable behaviors, a typical way of expressing impression management, especially in the absence of specific instructions regarding an audience's traits or values (Leary et al., 2011). Specifically, an increase in rmPFC activity was associated with more generous donations (Hare et al., 2010;Tusche et al., 2016), more frequent daily helping behavior (Rameson et al., 2012) and an increase in purchasing ethical products (Jung et al., 2018). rmPFC activity has also been linked to compliant behavior due to social influence, such as an increase in sunscreen use (Falk et al., 2010) and reduced smoking behavior (Cooper et al., 2015;Pegors et al., 2017) after receiving persuasive messages. ...
... OBS participants, compared to CON participants, showed increased rmPFC activity, tracking the valence level of trait adjectives during negative self-evaluation and positive friendevaluation. The observed role of rmPFC activity in impression management is consistent with its activity during social observation (Izuma et al., 2010;Somerville et al., 2013;Müller-Pinzler et al., 2015;Van Hoorn et al., 2016;Jung et al., 2018), during the experience of self-conscious emotions (Takahashi et al., 2004;Basile et al., 2011;Wagner et al., 2011;Michl et al., 2012;Gilead et al., 2016) and when engaging in socially desirable behavior (Hare et al., 2010;Rameson et al., 2012;Tusche et al., 2016). Moreover, our results are consistent with recent studies that have demonstrated the role of this region in dynamically monitoring self-value in the eyes of others Yoon et al., 2018). ...
People often engage in impression management by presenting themselves and others as socially desirable. However, specific behavioral manifestations and underlying neural mechanisms of impression management remain unknown. In this study, we investigated the neural mechanism of impression management during self-and friend-evaluation. Only participants assigned to the observation (OBS) group, not the control (CON) group, were informed that their responses would be monitored. They answered how well positive and negative trait adjectives described themselves or their friends. The behavioral results showed that the OBS group was more likely to reject negative traits for self-evaluation and to accept positive traits for friend-evaluation. An independent study revealed that demoting negative traits for oneself and promoting positive traits for a friend helps manage one's impression. In parallel with the behavioral results, in the OBS vs. the CON group, the rostromedial prefrontal cortex (RMPFC) and anterior insula (AI) activity showed a greater increase as the negativity of negatively valenced adjectives increased during self-evaluation and also showed a greater increase as the positivity of positively valenced adjectives increased during friend-evaluation. The present study suggests that RMPFC and AI are critically involved in impression management, promoting socially desirable target evaluations under social observation.
... Brain areas correlated with the mentalizing network are implicated in social trait attributions and trust situations, including the medial prefrontal cortex (Krueger et al., 2009;Riedl et al., 2014). However, brain areas broadly correlated with the empathy network comprise multiple regions including the medial frontal parts, cingulate cortex, anterior insula, and temporal gyri (Coll et al., 2017;Rameson et al., 2012;Rosenthal-Von Der Pütten et al., 2014). The empathy-related network is particularly salient when observing someone else's pain (Jackson et al., 2005;Singer et al., 2004) such as pictures of hands in painful situations (Gu & Han, 2007). ...
... Several limitations need to be addressed in the future. First, while we found prosocial-related responses to human doctors, past research has identified that neural signatures of prosociality, empathy, and trust elicit the identical activity of the medial frontal and temporal areas (Bellucci et al., 2020;Rameson et al. 2012;Riedl et al., 2014). ...
Will consumers accept artificial intelligence (AI) as a medical care provider? On the basis of evolution theory, we investigate the implicit psychological mechanisms that underlie consumers' interactions with medical AI and a human doctor. In a beha-vioral investigation (Study 1), consumers expressed a positive intention to use medical AI's healthcare services when it used personalized rather than mechanical conversation. However, neural investigation (Study 2) using functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that some consumers' implicit attitudes toward medical AI differed from their expressed behavioral intentions. The brain areas linked with implicitly apathetic emotions were activated even when medical AI used a perso-nalized conversation, whereas consumers' brains were activated in areas associated with prosociality when they interacted with a human doctor who used a persona-lized conversation. On the basis of our neural evidence, consumers perceive an identical personalized conversation differently when it is offered by a medical AI versus a human doctor. These findings have implications for the area of human-AI interactions and medical decision-making and suggest that replacing human doctors with medical AI is still an unrealistic proposition. K E Y W O R D S apathy, artificial intelligence, consumer neuroscience, fMRI, medical decision-making, personalization, prosociality
... To date, studies combing fMRI and EMA methodology are sparse, but pioneering work has been conducted in different fields, such as neural correlates of self-control and smoking cessation or reward system activity and positive affect ( Berkman et al., 2011 ;Forbes et al., 2009 ; furthermore e.g.: Kluge et al., 2018 ;Lopez et al., 2016 ;Provenzano et al., 2018 ;Seidel et al., 2018 ;Wilson et al., 2014 ). Three studies examined social affect and cognition in an attempt to predict everyday prosocial behavior ( Morelli et al., 2014 ;Rameson et al., 2012 ;Vekaria et al., 2020 ). The first study showed that mPFC activation was modulated by in-task experience of compassion and associated with mean daily helping (under cognitive load; Rameson et al., 2012 ). ...
... Three studies examined social affect and cognition in an attempt to predict everyday prosocial behavior ( Morelli et al., 2014 ;Rameson et al., 2012 ;Vekaria et al., 2020 ). The first study showed that mPFC activation was modulated by in-task experience of compassion and associated with mean daily helping (under cognitive load; Rameson et al., 2012 ). The second study showed that mean daily helping was associated with activity in a region identified as the septum ( Morelli et al., 2014 ). ...
Identifying distinct neural networks underlying social affect (empathy, compassion) and
social cognition (Theory of Mind) has advanced our understanding of social
interactions. However, little is known about the relation of activation in these networks
to psychological experience in daily life. This study (N = 122) examined the ecological
validity of neural activation patterns induced by a laboratory paradigm of social affect
and cognition with respect to social interactions in everyday life. We used the
EmpaToM task, a naturalistic video-based paradigm for the assessment of empathy,
compassion, and Theory of Mind, and combined it with a subsequent 14-day ecological
momentary assessment protocol on social interactions. Everyday social affect was
predicted by social affect experienced during the EmpaToM task, but not by related
neural activation in regions of interest from the social affect network. In contrast,
everyday social cognition was predicted by neural activation differences in the medial
prefrontal cortex – a region of interest from the social cognition network – but not by
social cognition performance in the EmpaToM task. The relationship between medial
prefrontal cortex activation and everyday social cognition was stronger for
spontaneous rather than deliberate perspective taking during the EmpaToM task,
pointing to a distinction between propensity and capacity in social cognition. Finally,
this neural indicator of Theory of Mind explained variance in everyday social cognition
to a similar extent as an established self-report scale. Taken together, this study
provides evidence for the ecological validity of lab-based social affect and cognition
paradigms when considering relevant moderating factors.
... Empathy, the ability to understand, experience, and respond to the emotional state of another person, is integral to successful human relationships (Decety & Jackson, 2006;Dziobek, Rogers, Fleck at al., 2008;Rameson, Morelli, & Lieberman, 2012;Singer, 2006). Although there is a notable lack of consensus regarding the definition, most researchers agree that empathy is a multifaceted construct comprising two distinct, but related components: affective and cognitive empathy. ...
... Empathy is the ability to understand and resonate with the affective experiences of others (Decety & Lamm, 2006;Singer & Lamm, 2009 & Lamm, 2006Dziobek, et al, 2008Rameson, et al, 2012;Singer, 2006). Two main components contribute to empathic processing: an affective component, which allows one to share the feelings of others, and a cognitive component (also referred to as metalizing, cognitive perspective-taking, or ToM), which involves the ability to identify and understand what another person is thinking or feeling without becoming emotionally involved (Frith, 2008;Premack & Woodruff, 1978;Shamay-Tsoory, 2011;Shamay-Tsoory, Aharon-Peretz, & Perry, 2009). ...
Social cognition and executive function are core components of adaptive social behaviour and follow a protracted developmental course. Importantly, deficits in both processes have been hypothesised to play causal role in the social difficulties characterising autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Despite substantial advances in the field, a number of important gaps have yet to be fully addressed. This thesis set out to empirically examine five outstanding research questions using data drawn from typically developing adults and adolescents, and a sample of adults diagnosed with high-functioning ASD. Findings revealed evidence of age-related improvements in multiple domains of social cognition and executive control between middle adolescence and young adulthood (Chapter 2). Typically developing adults and adolescents with elevated autism symptomatology were found to display a qualitatively similar, though milder pattern of difficulties in facial affect processing, theory of mind, and executive control, and these impairments appeared to be independent of trait alexithymia (Chapter 3). Elevated levels of ASD traits were associated with difficulties in processing social information in the context of executive control, and, once again, these impairments were found to be independent of alexithymia (Chapter 4). Extending these measures to a clinical sample revealed ASD-specific impairments. Findings showed that compared to neurtotypical controls, individuals with ASD were significantly poorer on a referential communication task performed under varying levels of cognitive load, and were less adept in regulating behavioural responses in the presence of affective information. ASD-related deficits were also observed on neutral measures of executive control. However, deficits on these tasks appeared to be less pronounced relative to a dual assessment task examining social and executive processing concurrently (Chapter 5). Finally, autism severity was associated with impaired perspective-taking abilities on a referential communication task. By contrast, no such associations were found between neutral measures of executive control. (Chapter 5) Overall, findings from the current thesis contribute to a deeper understanding of the age-associated changes in social and executive function during the later stages of adolescence, and provide a more comprehensive understanding of ASD-related difficulties in higher-order cognition at the clinical and subclinical level.
... intentions, and perceived feelings of another person in both imagined and real situations (Bernhardt and Singer 2012;Decety and Svetlova 2012;Rameson, Morelli, and Lieberman 2012). Empathy is understood as an essential ability to establish emotional bonds with others as its sensorydriven component allows the experience of sharing the effect of others. ...
... It is the first to assess the relationship between empathy and prosocial behaviour when subjected to a naturalistic cognitive load. Because we successfully replicated findings from previous studies investigating the effect of cognitive load on empathy [16][17][18][19] and prosocial behaviour 20 , we showed that cognitive load could be induced from real-world circumstances. Our findings also align with recent research into cognitive load effects on empathy. ...
Cognitive load reduces both empathy and prosocial behaviour. However, studies demonstrating these effects have induced cognitive load in a temporally limited, artificial manner that fails to capture real-world cognitive load. Drawing from cognitive load theory, we investigated whether naturally occurring cognitive load from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic moderated the relationship between empathy and prosocial behaviour (operationalised as support for public health measures). This large study in an Australian sample (N = 600) identified negative relationships between pandemic fatigue, empathy for people vulnerable to COVID-19, and prosocial behaviour, and a positive relationship between empathy and prosocial behaviour. Additionally, we found that the negative effect of the pandemic on prosocial behaviour depended on empathy for vulnerable others, with pandemic fatigue’s effects lowest for those with the highest empathy. These findings highlight the interrelationships of cognitive load and empathy, and the potential value of eliciting empathy to ease the impact of real-world cognitive load on prosocial behaviour.
... In humans, empathy is important to survival, the development of social interaction skills, and plays a significant role in prosocial behavior (Christov-Moore et. al., 2014;Rameson et al., 2012). Because empathy is vital to these crucial facets of human behavior, understanding how neural networks interact to produce empathy in healthy populations and in those with psychological disorders such as schizophrenia and conduct disorder (Fujino et al., 2014;Puzzo et al., 2018), has become an important area of study. ...
Empathy is a component of social cognition that allows us to understand, perceive, experience, and respond to the emotional state of others. In this study, we seek to build on previous research that suggests that sex and hormone levels may impact white matter microstructure. These white matter microstructural differences may influence social cognition. We examine the fractional anisotropy (FA) of white matter pathways associated with the complex human process of empathy in healthy young adult females during the self-reported luteal phase of their menstrual cycle. We used tract-based spatial statistics to perform statistical comparisons of FA and conducted multiple linear regression analysis to examine the strength of association between white matter FA and scores on the Empathy Quotient (EQ), a self-report questionnaire in which individuals report how much they agree or disagree with 60 statements pertaining to their empathic tendencies. Results identified a significant negative relationship between EQ scores and FA within five clusters of white matter: in the left forceps minor/body of the corpus callosum, left corticospinal tract, intraparietal sulcus/primary somatosensory cortex, superior longitudinal fasciculus, and right inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus/forceps minor. These consistent findings across clusters suggest that lower self-reported empathy is related to higher FA across healthy young females in specific white matter regions during the menstrual luteal phase. Future research should seek to examine if self-reported empathy varies across the menstrual cycle, using blood samples to confirm cycle phase and hormone levels.
... Many researchers put forward the different points of view on the association between perspective-taking and cognitive empathy: Davis (1980) In the experimental operation, many researchers also measured the ability of perspective-taking to be equivalent to cognitive empathy: A researcher measured the level of cognitive empathy by measuring the participants' perspective-taking ability. Rameson et al. (2012) used different methods to measure perspective-taking, but they also used perspective-taking as an indicator to measure cognitive empathy. In the study of Miklikowska et al. (2011), individuals' cognitive empathy level was judged according to their performance in the story expression task in which they imagined themselves in someone else's situation. ...
... Dual-process models of empathy theorize that cognitive empathy is a more rational process; while emotional empathy is less rational (Martingano, 2020;Yu & Chou, 2018). In support of a dual-process model, neurological evidence finds that a variety of cognitive empathy tasks (including theory of mind and perspective taking) involve distinct pre-frontal brain activation (Yu & Chou, 2018), relate more strongly to executive functioning (Yan et al., 2019), and require more mental resources, compared to emotional empathy (Davis et al., 1996;Dimberg et al., 2000;Morelli & Lieberman, 2013;Rameson et al., 2012). Although there is some evidence that cognitive empathy (in the form of recognizing emotions from facial expressions) occurs even under cognitive load (Tracy & Robins, 2008), this result is challenged by other research that finds a marginal or significant reduction in this skill under cognitive load (Ahmed, 2018;Lima et al., 2019;Reed & Steed, 2019;Tsouli et al., 2017). ...
As social media becomes more popular, so do debates about its socio-emotional implications. The current study examined the relationship between social media use and narcissism, alexithymia, and empathy among 1253 American adults. We find that, within this sample, social media use is negatively correlated with self-report and performance measures of empathy, particularly cognitive empathy, and positively correlated with narcissism and alexithymia. However, this result appears constrained to the demographics of this sample. We also report a mini meta-analysis on the relationship between empathy and social media use including our results alongside those of previous research. We find that this strength and direction of this relationship may depend upon nationality, age, and data collection date. In contrast to our result, studies conducted in Europe or with a sample under 18 years of age find a positive relationship between social media use and empathy. In addition, data collected in more recent years tends to report a more positive association between social media and empathy. This paper helps to clarify the relationship between social media use and socioemotional traits and contributes to public debates about social media.
... This construct largely overlaps with theory of mind, or the capacity to understand the mental states (intentions, desires, beliefs, emotions) of oneself and others. Theory of mind relies on an interconnected network of regions including the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and mPFC/ACC (Rameson et al., 2012;Ruby and Decety, 2004;Schurz et al., 2021Schurz et al., , 2014Young and Saxe, 2009). The right TPJ is causally involved in embodied perspective-taking and social cognition that involves imagining the self in the place of another person (Jackson et al., 2006;Martin et al., 2020;Decety, 2004, 2001). ...
The ability to share and understand the distress of others is critical for successful social interactions and is a fundamental building block of morality. Psychopathy is a personality disorder that includes lack of empathy and concern for others. In the present study, functional MRI was used to examine neural responses and functional connectivity associated with empathy and affective perspective taking in female inmates (N = 109) with various levels of psychopathic traits, as measured with Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R). Participants viewed hands and feet in painful or non-painful situations while adopting a first person or third person perspective. All participants demonstrated robust neural responses in anterior insula (aINS), anterior cingulate (ACC), temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and supplementary motor area (SMA) when viewing pain, both during imagine-self and imagine-other blocks. Psychopathy shifted the functional connectivity seeded in core nodes of the salience and social cognition networks. Perceiving stimuli depicting somatic pain led to decreased functional coupling from right temporoparietal junction to superior temporal sulcus, which correlated with scores on PCL-R Factor 1 (Affective/Interpersonal). In contrast, connectivity from right insula to precuneus increased with Factor 2 (Lifestyle/Antisocial) scores. When adopting a third-person perspective, psychopathic traits modulated connectivity from the social cognition network, but not the salience network, with Factor 1 scores associated with increased connectivity to sensorimotor cortex and temporal pole, while Factor 2 scores were associated with decreased connectivity with ACC/SMA and inferior frontal gyrus. Overall, these results demonstrate that psychopathic traits in incarcerated females are associated with atypical functional connectivity within the salience network during pain-empathy processing and within the social cognition network during affective perspective-taking.
... Dual-process models of empathy theorize that cognitive empathy is a more rational process; while emotional empathy is less rational (Martingano, 2020;Yu & Chou, 2018). In support of a dual-process model, neurological evidence finds that a variety of cognitive empathy tasks (including theory of mind and perspective taking) involve distinct pre-frontal brain activation (Yu & Chou, 2018), relate more strongly to executive functioning (Yan et al., 2019), and require more mental resources, compared to emotional empathy (Davis et al., 1996;Dimberg et al., 2000;Morelli & Lieberman, 2013;Rameson et al., 2012). Although there is some evidence that cognitive empathy (in the form of recognizing emotions from facial expressions) occurs even under cognitive load (Tracy & Robins, 2008), this result is challenged by other research that finds a marginal or significant reduction in this skill under cognitive load (Ahmed, 2018;Lima et al., 2019;Reed & Steed, 2019;Tsouli et al., 2017). ...
Empathy is frequently described in opposition to rationality. Yet in two studies, we demonstrate that the relationship between rationality and empathy is nuanced and likely context dependent. Study 1 reports correlational data from two American samples and Study 2 presents a meta-analysis of existing literature (k = 22). We demonstrate that various types of cognitive empathy (perspective-taking, emotion recognition, and fantasy) are positively correlated with self-reported rationality, but unrelated to rational performance. In contrast, types of emotional empathy (empathic concern, personal distress, and emotion contagion) are generally negatively correlated with performance measures of rationality, but their relationships with self-reported rationality are divergent. Although these results do not settle the debate on empathy and rationality, they challenge the opposing domains hypothesis and provide tentative support for a dual-process model of empathy. Overall, these results indicate that the relationship between rationality and empathy differs depending upon how rationality and empathy are measured.
... While the effects of psychopharmacological manipulations on first-hand and 58 empathy for pain have been consistently demonstrated, their potential downstream effects on 59 prosocial behavior remain to be established. Understanding these effects is fundamentally 60 important, as these processes are not only key drivers of group bonding and social cohesion, 61 but also strongly contribute to individual and societal wellbeing (de Waal, 2008 for a review; 62 Rameson et al., 2012). 63 ...
Administration of painkillers has been shown to lower pain empathy, but whether this also reduces prosocial behavior is not known. In this preregistered study, we investigated whether inducing analgesia through a placebo painkiller reduced effortful helping. When given the opportunity to reduce the pain of another person, individuals experiencing placebo analgesia made fewer prosocial choices, helped less quickly, and exerted less physical effort when helping, compared to control participants with unaltered pain sensitivity. Furthermore, self-reported empathic unpleasantness positively correlated with prosocial choices across the whole sample. Reduced pain sensitivity thus not only influences empathy, as previously shown, but also negatively impacts prosocial behavior. Given the importance of prosociality for social cohesion, these findings have broad potential implications for both individuals under the influence of painkillers and for society at large.
... This transference of the psychological determinants of prosocial behaviour and the subsequent prosocial responses within virtual environments (and towards social agents) falls in line with the predictions of the media equation theory [Reeves and Nass 1996], which broadly states that technology that can elicit social responses from humans, similar to those elicited by other humans the same social situations. These can include, much like in-person prosocial behaviour, user-related variables (such as personality [Graziano et al. 2007, Habashi et al. 2016, Hilbig et al. 2014, Pursell et al. 2008, dispositional compassion and empathy [Lim and DeSteno 2016, Lupoli et al. 2017, Rameson et al. 2012 or emotions [Batson 2014]), virtual environment-related variables (such as the presence of bystanders [King et al. 2008, Kozlov and Johansen 2010, Slater et al. 2013) and agent-related variables (such as ethnicity [Gamberini et al. 2015] and gaze behaviour [Slater et al. 2013]). ...
... Differential recruitment of empathy and mentalizing is linked to variance in altruistic behaviors across people and contexts. Neural substrates of empathy and mentalizing in altruism are consistent with meta-analytical findings on core brain networks of empathy and mentalizing reviewed above (Hare et al., 2010;Hein et al., 2010;Masten et al., 2011;Mathur et al., 2010;Morelli et al., 2014;Morishima et al., 2012;Rameson et al., 2012;Telzer et al., 2011;Waytz et al., 2012) (for a recent comparison of meta-analytical maps for empathy, mentalizing, and prosociality, see Bellucci et al., 2020). ...
This article discusses insights from computational models and social neuroscience into motivations, precursors, and mechanisms of altruistic decision‐making and other‐regard. We introduce theoretical and methodological tools for researchers who wish to adopt a multilevel, computational approach to study behaviors that promote others' welfare. Using examples from recent studies, we outline multiple mental and neural processes relevant to altruism. To this end, we integrate evidence from neuroimaging, psychology, economics, and formalized mathematical models. We introduce basic mechanisms—pertinent to a broad range of value‐based decisions—and social emotions and cognitions commonly recruited when our decisions involve other people. Regarding the latter, we discuss how decomposing distinct facets of social processes can advance altruistic models and the development of novel, targeted interventions. We propose that an accelerated synthesis of computational approaches and social neuroscience represents a critical step towards a more comprehensive understanding of altruistic decision‐making. We discuss the utility of this approach to study lifespan differences in social preference in late adulthood, a crucial future direction in aging global populations. Finally, we review potential pitfalls and recommendations for researchers interested in applying a computational approach to their research. This article is categorized under: Economics > Interactive Decision‐Making Psychology > Emotion and Motivation Neuroscience > Cognition Economics > Individual Decision‐Making Insights from computational models and social neuroscience into altruism.
... Given the established links between empathy and social interaction and the emerging evidence that lower levels of empathy are associated with greater loneliness in older adults [70], this is an area worthy of further investigation. Temporoparietal junction [85], medial prefrontal cortex [86] ...
Huntington’s disease starts slowly and progresses over a 15–20 year period. Motor changes begin subtly, often going unnoticed by patients although they are typically visible to those close to them. At this point, it is the early non-motor problems of HD that arguably cause the most functional impairment. Approximately 65% of gene carriers will experience a reduction in their occupational level, and just under half will feel unable to manage their finances independently before a clinical diagnosis is made. Understanding what drives this impairment in activities of daily living is the key to helping people with HD to live more independently for longer, especially in early disease. Early cognitive decline is likely to play a contributory factor although few studies have looked directly at this relationship. Recently, it has been shown that along with the well documented dysexecutive syndrome seen in HD, changes in social cognition and decision-making are more common than previously thought. Furthermore, some of the early neuropathological and neurochemical changes seen in HD disrupt networks known to be involved in social functioning. In this review, we explore how HD changes the way individuals interact in a social world. Specifically, we summarise the literature on both classical and social decision-making (value-based decision-making in a social context) along with studies of theory of mind, empathy, alexithymia, and emotion recognition in HD. The literature specific to HD is discussed and supported by evidence from similar neurodegenerative disorders and healthy individuals to propose future directions and potential therapeutic avenues to be explored.
... This additional knowledge of motivation enables studies of empathy that use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate empathy (e.g. Masten et al., 2011or Rameson et al., 2012. However, this is not the case in studies of non-human animals or in cases where selfreporting is problematic in humans; without self-reporting, the motivation behind actions becomes somewhat speculative. ...
Exploring the social release paradigm and development of empathy conceptualizations.
... There is also a brain activation overlap between the affective facet of the pain matrix and affective empathy (see Eisenberger, 2012). Moreover, evidence suggests brain areas are activated differently for cognitive and affective empathy Rameson et al., 2012). Overall, because affective empathy activates the same brain regions as the affective component of the pain matrix, it follows that experiencing psychological pain would trigger affective responses in ways similar to physical pain, albeit moderated by similar prior painful experience between the empathizer and target. ...
Previous studies have demonstrated a link between prior experience of physical pain and empathic response within similar settings. However, much less is known about emotional hurt derived from psychologically painful situations and the expression of empathy, despite evidence that different types of pain can be experienced in similar ways. Using qualitative and quantitative methodologies, the current paper explored the relationship between college students’ (mostly female) experience with psychological pain and level of empathy evoked by pictures of strangers experiencing physical and psychological pain. Findings from all three studies indicated similar empathic reactions (in the form of pain perception, empathic concern, perspective taking, and intention to help) toward physical and psychological pain. However, participants’ feelings after observing physical and psychological pain were related to their prior similar painful experiences. This suggests that similar prior psychological painful experience can impact affective empathy when observing another in psychological pain, but not cognitive empathy. Implication for research on empathy evoked by observing psychological pain and the influence of similar past painful experiences are discussed.
... In the present study, we focused on the interpersonal/contextual determinants of prosocial behavior, because of our study's specificity. The main factors evoked in the literature that influence prosocial behavior at this level of analysis, are the pressure of the situation [11][12][13][14], the status of the person who requests help (known vs. unknown person; see [14][15][16][17]), the nature of engagement of the person who provides support (informal vs. formal task; see [18][19][20][21]) and the presence of ethnic/social class/regional stereotypes. Regarding the influence of ethnic stereotypes on helping behavior, Feldman [22] showed that subjects from Greece, France, and the US answered differently to request for directions, when they were solicited by foreigners or compatriots. ...
We analyzed prosocial behaviors in a field experiment (N = 307) conducted in an urban context (Timisoara, Banat region, Romania), starting from a classical Cross-Cultural Psychology research organized in UK and Iran by Collet & O’Shea in 1976. If the evoked study is focused on comparing prosocial behaviors in two very different national cultures (UK vs.Iran), we compared helping strangers strategies within the same national culture in relation to the regional identities of the help-seeking subjects. A behavioral scenario was created by asking naïve participants to offer support and give directions to a place even if they did not know its whereabouts. Drawing on social identity theory, it was tested whether regional
belonging of the help-seeker (in-group vs. out-group) predicts the availability of help-givers for offering help, their availability for giving wrong directions, as well as their emotional expressiveness. Results are interpreted within the perspective of social distance between
groups and show that the more distant regional identities are perceived to be, the less generous help-givers are, both in terms of their decision to help and to give wrong directions, as well as in their expressed emotions.
... Meanwhile, instrumental support refers to listening to emotional disclosures (e.g. doing well on examinations and getting into an argument) and providing tangible assistance (e.g. the type and number of helping behaviours; such as care during sickness, assisting with learning techniques, and lending money) (Morelli, Lee, Arnn, & Zaki, 2015;Rameson, Morelli & Lieberman, 2012). For example, instrumental support is provided by mentors to assist mentees in realising the similarities between what they learn in mentoring programs and campus environments (Podsakoff, MacKenzie & Podsakoff, 2003). ...
... The engagement of the entire ToM network is crucial for grasping the effects of receiving practical help and to reason on how the others' mental states can be affected by a behavior (Mars et al., 2012). Similarly, increased activation in mPFC and greater functional coupling with rTPJ is consistent with the two cognitive roles that this region plays in practical help: social cognitive processing, including mentalization (Castelli et al., 2000;Rameson et al., 2012;Chavez and Heatherton, 2015;Majdandžić et al., 2016), attribution of the self (Schilbach et al., 2008;Mars et al., 2012), and reward processing (Morelli et al., 2015); cognitive processing for the understanding of the social context and in adapting goal-directed behavior to social outcomes (Powers et al., 2015). Additionally, the engagement of parietotemporal regions during practical help can support high-level cognitive and emotional processing that is needed to understand cognitive information associated in social contexts. ...
Prosocial behavior is critical for the natural development of an individual as well as for promoting social relationships. Although this complex behavior results from gratuitous acts occurring between an agent and a recipient and a wealth of literature on prosocial behavior has investigated these actions, little is known about the effects on the recipient and the neurobiology underlying them. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify neural correlates of receiving prosocial behavior in the context of real-world experiences, with different types of action provided by the agent, including practical help and effort appreciation. Practical help was associated with increased activation in a network of regions spanning across bilateral superior temporal sulcus, temporoparietal junction, temporal pole, and medial prefrontal cortex. Effort appreciation was associated with activation and increased task-modulated connectivity of the occipital cortex. Prosocial-dependent brain responses were associated with positive affect. Our results support the role of the theory of mind network and the visual cortices in mediating the positive effects of receiving gratuitous help. Moreover, they indicate that specific types of prosocial behavior are mediated by distinct brain networks, which further demonstrates the uniqueness of the psychological processes underlying prosocial actions.
... In humans, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, to which the medial frontal gyrus belongs, is a central part of the social brain network that enables people to understand and interact with one another ( Frith and Frith, 2007 ;Seitz et al., 2006 ). Activity in the medial frontal cortex has been linked to empathy-related prosocial behavior, such as helping others ( Rameson et al., 2012 ), and altruistic motivations ( Basile et al., 2011 ;Moll et al., 2007 ). This region has been repeatedly identified as an appraisal dimension that facilitates social knowledge involving inferences of other's internal thoughts and their evaluation (for a review see Wagner et al., 2012 ). ...
Female chemical signals underlie the advertising of sexual receptivity and fertility. Whether the body odor of a pregnant woman also has a signaling function with respect to male behavior is yet to be conclusively established. This study examines how the body odors of ovulating and pregnant women differentially affect the behavior of heterosexual men.
Body odor samples were collected from 5 pregnant women and 5 matched controls during ovulation. In a double-blind functional magnetic resonance imaging design, 18 heterosexual men were exposed to female body odors during ovulation (OV) and pregnancy (PRG) while being required to indicate the attractiveness of concurrently presented female portrait images. The participants were also required to indicate whether they assumed a depicted woman was pregnant.
While neither OV nor PRG altered the perceived attractiveness of a presented face, the men tended to identify the women as pregnant while exposed to a PRG body odor. On the neural level, OV activated a network of the frontotemporal and limbic regions, while PRG activated the superior medial frontal gyrus.
The results suggest that the detection of sexual availability activates the male brain regions associated with face processing and reward/motivation, whereas sensing pregnancy activates a region responsible for empathy and prosocial behavior. Thus, the female body odor during pregnancy likely helps foster circumstances conducive to the future care of offspring while the body odor advertising sexual availability promotes mating behavior. The brains of heterosexual men may be capable of unconsciously discriminating between these two types of olfactory stimuli.
... significance of one's existence, as through this type of communication, feeling empathy for others is essential. Because the seat of empathy is located partly in the PFC (Meyer et al., 2013;Rameson et al., 2012), that region's increased activity may have reflected its effect. ...
This study aimed to explore differences in frontal lobe brain activity associated with two types of communication: task-oriented and life-worldly, the latter of which largely overlaps with everyday conversation. Using near-infrared spectroscopy, we explored differences by comparing oxygenated hemoglobin concentrations associated with periods of rest and conversation in two experimental groups comprising older and younger adults. Artifacts were removed from the signals using discrete wavelet transforms. Paired t-tests were used to compare the resulting data for the two types. The results showed that oxygenated hemoglobin levels during life-worldly communication were significantly higher than at baseline or during task-oriented communication, particularly for the older adult group. In addition, during life-worldly communication, relatively high levels of brain activity were found in the upper part of the Broca area and in the premotor cortex. These results, which suggest that life-worldly communication generates more activity in the frontal lobe, could potentially contribute to improving how caregivers communicate with older patients/residents in hospitals and nursing homes.
... It is possible to increase our automatic empathic tendencies (Rameson et al., 2012). And if we increase our prosocial affective empathy towards outgroups, we may increase social tolerance and harmony, which opens up a pathway to achieving equality and nondiscrimination. ...
Empathy is the ability to experience affective and cognitive states of another person, whilst maintaining a distinct self, in order to understand the other. It is a multidimensional phenomenon, ranging from vicarious distress to near complete understanding, with many shades in between. As an almost universal and integral human construct, empathy has been considered in many disciplines and contexts, from evolution to gender, politics, economics, ethics, human rights and neuroscience. Each of these disciplines offers a range of definitions of empathy, and provides unique insights into the role of empathy in achieving different types of social outcomes, including those with both prosocial and antisocial intentions. The conceptualization generated from interdisciplinary perspectives is important because it allows us to identify commonalities that could be mobilized synergistically to achieve greater social benefit through prosocial empathy. This review discusses the benevolent and malevolent manifestations of empathy from the perspective of social, legal and psychological sciences in order to lay the foundation for a theoretical discussion on the potential of harnessing prosocial empathy to advance equality and non-discrimination.
... Also within the "Afraid for you" context, low-CU adolescents were more similar (and other adolescents were most dissimilar to each other) in regions that included mPFC and ACC. Previous studies have found that perspective-taking, emotional appraisal, and cognitive empathy tasks recruit mPFC in both adults (Bzdok et al., 2012;Rameson, Morelli, & Lieberman, 2012;Schurz, Radua, Aichhorn, Richlan, & Perner, 2014;Tusche, Bockler, Kanske, Trautwein, & Singer, 2016;Van Overwalle, 2009) and adolescents (Sebastian et al., 2012). For example, mPFC activation increases when adolescents perform tasks that require making inferences about social interactions (Kilford, Garrett, & Blakemore, 2016;Sebastian, Burnett, & Blakemore, 2008;Vollm et al., 2006). ...
Callous-unemotional (CU) traits are early-emerging personality features characterized by deficits in empathy, concern for others, and remorse following social transgressions. One of the interpersonal deficits most consistently associated with CU traits is impaired behavioral and neurophysiological responsiveness to fearful facial expressions. However, the facial expression paradigms traditionally employed in neuroimaging are often ambiguous with respect to the nature of threat (i.e., is the perceiver the threat, or is something else in the environment?). In the present study, 30 adolescents with varying CU traits viewed fearful facial expressions cued to three different contexts (“afraid for you,” “afraid of you,” “afraid for self”) while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Univariate analyses found that mean right amygdala activity during the “afraid for self” context was negatively associated with CU traits. With the goal of disentangling idiosyncratic stimulus-driven neural responses, we employed intersubject representational similarity analysis to link intersubject similarities in multivoxel neural response patterns to contextualized fearful expressions with differential intersubject models of CU traits. Among low-CU adolescents, neural response patterns while viewing fearful faces were most consistently similar early in the visual processing stream and among regions implicated in affective responding, but were more idiosyncratic as emotional face information moved up the cortical processing hierarchy. By contrast, high-CU adolescents’ neural response patterns consistently aligned along the entire cortical hierarchy (but diverged among low-CU youths). Observed patterns varied across contexts, suggesting that interpretations of fearful expressions depend to an extent on neural response patterns and are further shaped by levels of CU traits.
... Prosocial behavior has been linked to empathy (e.g., [8][9][10][11][12]), which is an emotional response that focuses on others [13]. For instance, high empathy levels were found to induce increased altruistic behavior that was expressed by greater resource allocation to the target of the empathy [14,15]. ...
Following previous research on various aspects of contests, we aim to explore how taking part in a contest affects subsequent behavior. We focus on whether the experience of having just competed in a contest, beyond its outcome, would have an impact on other-regarding decisions towards an individual who was not part of the preliminary contest. In addition, in light of inconclusive results in the existing literature regarding the effect of contest outcome on subsequent prosociality, we reexamine this effect. In line with our hypothesis, participation in a contest was found to reduce prosociality. Additionally, we found that winning a contest reduced prosociality only when decisions were framed as "giving" decisions and not as "dividing" decisions. This finding suggests that the effect of contest outcome may depend on specific elements of the presented situations.
... amygdala, anterior insula) and cognitive empathy (e.g. dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex) in fMRI studies can positively predict the willingness to perform prosocial behaviors (Singer et al., 2008;Rameson et al., 2012;Waytz et al., 2012;Keysers and Gazzola, 2018). Another framework known as the self-other model of empathy (SOME) addresses the complexity of 'how empathy is shared' or how affective and cognitive systems allow for empathy to be experienced (Bird and Viding, 2014). ...
Empathy is a complex phenomenon critical for group survival and societal bonds. In addition, there is mounting evidence demonstrating empathic behaviors are dysregulated in a multitude of psychiatric disorders ranging from autism spectrum disorder, substance use disorders, and personality disorders. Therefore, understanding the underlying drive and neurobiology of empathy is paramount for improving the treatment outcomes and quality of life for individuals suffering from these psychiatric disorders. While there is a growing list of human studies, there is still much about empathy to understand, likely due to both its complexity and the inherent limitations of imaging modalities. It is therefore imperative to develop, validate, and utilize rodent models of empathic behaviors as translational tools to explore this complex topic in ways human research cannot. This review outlines some of the more prevailing theories of empathy, lists some of the psychiatric disorders with disrupted empathic processes, describes rat and mouse models of empathic behaviors currently used, and discusses ways in which these models have elucidated social, environmental, and neurobiological factors that may modulate empathy. The research tools afforded to rodent models will provide an increasingly clear translational understanding of empathic processes and consequently result in improvements in care for those diagnosed with any one of the many psychiatric disorders. Behavioural Pharmacology XXX: 000-000
... Rameson, Morelli and Lieberman [33] indicate that dispositional empathy generates empathetic reactions automatically. However, situational empathy is influenced by social capacity towards a specific situation [7], which is generated in more specific contexts [30]. ...
High perceived academic self-efficacy influences both subject performance and emotions of the subject. In turn, dispositional empathy implies a social and emotional adaptability towards the subject itself and those around them. This study aimed to analyze the differences in the mean dispositional empathy factors (i.e., perspective taking, fantasy, empathic concern and personal distress) between future teachers with high and low perceived academic self-efficacy, as well as the predictive capacity of dispositional empathy on high perceived academic self-efficacy, and the correlations between both dimensions. For this, a sample of 805 Spanish students of the Faculties of Education of the Universities of Alicante and Murcia was recruited. The Escala de Autoeficacia Percibida Específica de Situaciones Académicas was used to assess perceived academic self-efficacy and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index was used to analyze the dimensions of dispositional empathy. It was observed that high academic self-efficacy is more likely to present in people with a high level of perspective taking and fantasy (OR = 1.07 and 1.09, respectively) and less for those with personal discomfort (OR = 0.17). The other analyzes provided the same conclusions. In conclusion, it is important to develop perceived academic self-efficacy in undergraduates and future teachers due to the consequences that can lead to their classrooms.
... Suffering is everywhere, unavoidable and its scope is often overwhelming. Despite the evidence that people empathize with others' social emotions and suffering (Masten, Morelli, & Eisenberger, 2011;Rameson, Morelli, & Lieberman, 2012), we witness daily the mistreatment or exclusion of suffering others. Social suffering, closely connected to social misery, is on the rise and plagues modern society. ...
Two experiments were conducted in order to test whether suffering as a result of bullying affects the perceived humanness of the victims. We hypothesized that observers who are confronted with suffering and passive endurance of victimization will view victims as less than human. We propose a double dehumanization of victims, that is, denial of both their human uniqueness and human nature. We also hypothesized that victims' defending themselves and deploying agency rather than passivity, has a humanizing effect on observers' perceptions of the victims. Suffering was manipulated via vignettes describing bullying incidents experienced by both children and adult victims. Study 1 (N = 197) fully corroborated our first hypothesis. Study 2 (N = 164) replicated the findings of Study 1 and additionally showed that victims' defense of themselves before harm-doers had a doubly humanizing effect on them (i.e., attribution of higher uniquely human but also human nature traits). These results provided support to our second hypothesis. Findings are discussed in terms of perceivers' detachment from those who display passivity instead of agency in conditions that involve suffering.
Empathy is a foundational construct in person-centered psychotherapies because it promotes clients’ self-exploration and growth. However, as the construct of empathy drew attention from various disciplines, the definitions of empathy became ambiguous. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to articulate the conceptual understanding of empathy competence for the specific discipline of the counseling profession. I review the development of the conceptualization of empathy in the counseling literature and propose a theoretical framework, Process of Interpersonal Empathy (PIE), in the hope of providing a consistent definition to address counselors’ empathy competence. The PIE illustrates counselors’ empathy competence as a collection of multidimensional ingredients functioning in a process with active engagement by both the counselor and the client. The ingredients of the PIE include conceptualization, emotional awareness, and interpersonal empathy. Additionally, I discuss how each ingredient plays a role in counseling relationships. The formation of the PIE provides several implications for counseling researchers, counselor educators, and supervisors.
In the past decades, affective science has overwhelmingly demonstrated the unique properties of affective information to bias our attention, memory, and decisions. At the same time, accumulating evidence suggests that neutral and affective representations rely on the same working memory substrates for the selection and computation of information and that they are therefore restricted by the same capacity limitations that these substrates impose. Here, we integrate these insights into a working memory model of affective processing (WMAP). Drawing on competitive access models of working memory, we discuss its role in the various stages of affective processing, from attentional selection to maintenance and memory storage, and resulting feelings and actions. We end our overview with some open questions and future directions.
Empathy, the ability to perceive the affective state of another, is a complex process that is integral to many of the prosocial behaviors expressed in humans and across the animal kingdom. Research into the behavioral and neurobiological underpinnings of empathic behaviors has increased in recent years. Growing evidence suggests changes in empathy may contribute to a myriad of psychiatric illnesses, including substance use disorder (SUD). Indeed, both clinical and preclinical research in SUD demonstrates a strong relationship between drug taking or relapse events and changes to empathic behavior. Further, there is significant overlap in the underlying neural substrates of these complex behaviors, including the insula, paraventricular nucleus of thalamus (PVT), and the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (PVN). In this review, we will discuss our current understanding of the interplay between empathic behaviors and SUD. We will also examine the underlying neurobiology that may regulate this interaction, focusing specifically on the insula, PVT, and PVN. Finally, we discuss the biologic and therapeutic importance of taking empathic processes into consideration when discussing SUD.
Painkiller administration lowers pain empathy, but whether this also reduces prosocial behavior is unknown. In this preregistered study, we investigated whether inducing analgesia through a placebo painkiller reduced effortful helping. When given the opportunity to reduce the pain of another person, individuals experiencing placebo analgesia ( n = 45 adults from Austria; 21 male, 24 female) made fewer prosocial choices at the lowest helping level and exerted less physical effort when helping, compared with controls whose pain sensitivity was unaltered ( n = 45; 21 male, 24 female). Self-reported empathic unpleasantness positively correlated with prosocial choices across the whole sample. While not replicating group differences in empathy, a mediation analysis revealed that the level of unpleasantness to other people’s pain fully mediated the effect of placebo analgesia on prosocial choices. Given the importance of prosociality for social cohesion, these findings have broad potential implications both for individuals under the influence of painkillers and for society at large.
Interdisciplinary research has proposed a multifaceted view of human cognition and morality, establishing that inputs from multiple cognitive and affective processes guide moral decisions. However, extant work on moral cognition has largely overlooked the contributions of episodic representation. The ability to remember or imagine a specific moment in time plays a broadly influential role in cognition and behavior. Yet, existing research has only begun exploring the influence of episodic representation on moral cognition. Here, we evaluate the theoretical connections between episodic representation and moral cognition, review emerging empirical work revealing how episodic representation affects moral decision-making, and conclude by highlighting gaps in the literature and open questions. We argue that a comprehensive model of moral cognition will require including the episodic memory system, further delineating its direct influence on moral thought, and better understanding its interactions with other mental processes to fundamentally shape our sense of right and wrong.
We proposed a model wherein high intrinsic motivation for work activities fosters high empathy and empathy promotes prosocial behavior, which contributes to greater social support. The results showed that employees with high intrinsic motivation for work activities had greater empathy, and intrinsic motivation was significantly related to social support through empathy and in turn prosocial behavior. This study elucidates the factors that underlie individuals' empathy and extends our understanding of the beneficial function of intrinsic motivation beyond the achievement domain to caring for others and enhancing social support in the social domain.
While empathy and Theory of Mind (ToM) have classically been studied as separate social functions, recent advances demonstrate the need to investigate the two in interaction: Naturalistic settings often blur the distinction of affect and cognition and demand the simultaneous processing of such different stimulus dimensions. Here, we investigate how empathy and ToM related brain networks interact in contexts wherein multiple cognitive and affective demands must be processed simultaneously. Building on the findings of a recent meta-analysis and hierarchical clustering analysis, we perform meta-analytic connectivity modeling to determine patterns of task-context specific network changes. We analyze 140 studies including classical empathy and ToM tasks, as well as complex social tasks. For studies at the intersection of empathy and ToM, neural co-activation patterns included areas typically associated with both empathy and ToM. Network integration is discussed as a means of combining mechanisms across unique behavioral domains. Such integration may enable adaptive behavior in complex, naturalistic social settings that require simultaneous processing of a multitude of different affective and cognitive information.
Decision making is a process that can be strongly affected by social factors. Profuse evidence has shown how people deviate from traditional rational-choice predictions under different levels of social interactions. The emergence of prosocial decision making, defined as any action that is addressed to benefit another individual even at the expense of personal benefits, has been reported as an important example of such social influence. Furthermore, brain evidence has shown the involvement of structures such the prefrontal cortex, anterior insula and midcingulate cortex during decision settings in which a decision maker interacts with others under physical pain or distress or while being observed by others. Using a slightly modified version of the dictator game, we tested the hypothesis that the inclusion of another person into the decision setting increases prosocial decisions in young adults and that this increase is higher when the other person is associated with others in need. At the brain level, we hypothesized that the increase in prosocial decisions correlates with frontal theta activity as a marker of empathy saliency. The results showed that the inclusion of another person into the decision setting increased prosocial behavior only when this presence was associated with someone in need and that this was associated with an increase in frontocentral theta-oscillatory activity. These results suggest that the presence of someone in need enhances both empathy concerns and norm compliance, raising the participants’ prosocial decision making.
Handicapped people have faced discriminatory attitudes from the non-handicapped. This often deprives them of fundamental human rights and can exacerbate mental illness. Symbolic ableism is one of the key forms of discriminatory attitudes toward the handicapped, and this is regarded as a cause of disagreement with policies to support the handicapped. The propensity of symbolic ableism can be measured by the Symbolic Ableism Scale (SAS; Friedman & Awsumb, 2019), which divides symbolic ableism into four components: individualism, lack of recognition of continuing discrimination, lack of empathy for disabled people, and excessive demands. Although this scale is necessary for understanding people’s attitudes toward the handicapped, it is not available in Japanese. This study was conducted to develop a Japanese version of SAS (SAS-J) and examined its reliability and validity. The result showed that SAS-J was divided into two components (i.e., individualism and lack of recognition of current condition), which is different from the original version. We discussed possible explanations of this difference, the reliability and validity of SAS-J, and future directions of symbolic ableism.
Vul, Harris, Winkielman, and Pashler (2009), (this issue) claim that many brain-personality correlations in fMRI studies are "likely … spurious" (p. 274), and "should not be believed" (p. 285). Several of their conclusions are incorrect. First, they incorrectly claim that whole-brain regressions use an invalid and "nonindependent" two-step inferential procedure, a determination based on a survey sent to researchers that only included nondiagnostic questions about the descriptive process of plotting one's data. We explain how whole-brain regressions are a valid single-step method of identifying brain regions that have reliable correlations with individual difference measures. Second, they claim that large correlations from whole-brain regression analyses may be the result of noise alone. We provide a simulation to demonstrate that typical fMRI sample sizes will only rarely produce large correlations in the absence of any true effect. Third, they claim that the reported correlations are inflated to the point of being "implausibly high." Though biased post hoc correlation estimates are a well-known consequence of conducting multiple tests, Vul et al. make inaccurate assumptions when estimating the theoretical ceiling of such correlations. Moreover, their own "meta-analysis suggests that the magnitude of the bias is approximately .12-a rather modest bias.
© 2009 Association for Psychological Science.
Search times and errors were recorded for targets (a gray triangle or trapezoid) in static marine radar, chart, and radar–chart overlay bitmap computer displays, and for targets in bitmap aerial photo displays. Lossless JPEG and ZIP compressed file lengths were obtained for each display. The two types of compressed file length were correlated and they predicted both the time to search each display and the number of search errors. Search time began increasing with increasing file size before errors began to increase. Compressed file size, an objective, easily obtained measure of display complexity, predicts both subjective complexity judgments (previous research) and objective search performance (these experiments). It is analogous to algorithmic complexity, a theoretical but impractical measure of bit string complexity. The data suggest that it may be possible to use the compressed file size measure to predict display performance in applied tasks.
Recent neuroimaging and neuropsychological work has begun to shed light on how the brain responds to the viewing of facial expressions of emotion. However, one important category of facial expression that has not been studied on this level is the facial expression of pain. We investigated the neural response to pain expressions by performing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as subjects viewed short video sequences showing faces expressing either moderate pain or, for comparison, no pain. In alternate blocks, the same subjects received both painful and non-painful thermal stimulation. Facial expressions of pain were found to engage cortical areas also engaged by the first-hand experience of pain, including anterior cingulate cortex and insula. The reported findings corroborate other work in which the neural response to witnessed pain has been examined from other perspectives. In addition, they lend support to the idea that common neural substrates are involved in representing one's own and others' affective states.
Person perception includes three sequential processes: categorization (what is the actor doing?), characterization (what trait does the action imply?), and correction (what situational constraints may have caused the action?). We argue that correction is less automatic (i.e., more easily disrupted) than either categorization or characterization. In Experiment 1, subjects observed a target behave anxiously in an anxiety-provoking situation. In Experiment 2, subjects listened to a target read a political speech that he had been constrained to write. In both experiments, control subjects used information about situational constraints when drawing inferences about the target, but cognitively busy subjects (who performed an additional cognitive task during encoding) did not. The results (a) suggest that person perception is a combination of lower and higher order processes that differ in their susceptibility to disruption and (b) highlight the fundamental differences between active and passive perceivers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Previous functional brain imaging studies suggest that the ability to infer the intentions and mental states of others (social cognition) is mediated by medial prefrontal cortex. Little is known about the anatomy of empathy and forgiveness. We used functional MRI to detect brain regions engaged by judging others' emotional states and the forgivability of their crimes. Ten volunteers read and made judgements based on social scenarios and a high level baseline task (social reasoning). Both empathic and forgivability judgements activated left superior frontal gyrus, orbitofrontal gyrus and precuneus. Empathic judgements also activated left anterior middle temporal and left inferior frontal gyri, while forgivability judgements activated posterior cingulate gyrus. Empathic and forgivability judgements activate specific regions of the human brain, which we propose contribute to social cohesion.
Behavioral research on emotion regulation thus far has focused on conscious and deliberative strategies such as reappraisal. Neuroscience investigations into emotion regulation have followed suit. However, neuroimaging tools now open the door to investigate more automatic forms of emotion regulation that take place incidentally and potentially outside of participant awareness that have previously been difficult to examine. The present paper reviews studies on the neuroscience of intentional/deliberate emotion regulation and identifies opportunities for future directions that have not yet been addressed. The authors suggest a broad framework for emotion regulation that includes both deliberative and incidental forms. This framework allows insights from incidental emotion regulation to address open questions about existing work, and vice versa. Several studies relevant to incidental emotion regulation are reviewed with the goal of providing an empirical and methodological groundwork for future research. Finally, several theoretical issues for incidental and intentional emotion regulation are discussed.
The newly emerging field of Social Neuroscience has drawn much attention in recent
years, with high-profile studies frequently reporting extremely high (e.g., >.8)
correlations between behavioral and self-report measures of personality or emotion and
measures of brain activation obtained using fMRI. We show that these correlations often
exceed what is statistically possible assuming the (evidently rather limited) reliability of
both fMRI and personality/emotion measures. The implausibly high correlations are all
the more puzzling because social-neuroscience method sections rarely contain sufficient
detail to ascertain how these correlations were obtained. We surveyed authors of 54
articles that reported findings of this kind to determine the details of their analyses. More
than half acknowledged using a strategy that computes separate correlations for
individual voxels, and reports means of just the subset of voxels exceeding chosen
thresholds. We show how this non-independent analysis grossly inflates correlations,
while yielding reassuring-looking scattergrams. This analysis technique was used to
obtain the vast majority of the implausibly high correlations in our survey sample. In
addition, we argue that other analysis problems likely created entirely spurious
correlations in some cases. We outline how the data from these studies could be
reanalyzed with unbiased methods to provide the field with accurate estimates of the
correlations in question. We urge authors to perform such reanalyses and to correct the
scientific record.
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.
People vicariously experience embarrassment when observing others' public pratfalls or etiquette violations. In two consecutive studies we investigated the subjective experience and the neural correlates of vicarious embarrassment for others in a broad range of situations. We demonstrated, first, that vicarious embarrassment was experienced regardless of whether the observed protagonist acted accidentally or intentionally and was aware or unaware that he/she was in an embarrassing situation. Second, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we showed that the anterior cingulate cortex and the left anterior insula, two cortical structures typically involved in vicarious feelings of others' pain, are also strongly implicated in experiencing the ‘social pain’ for others' flaws and pratfalls. This holds true even for situations that engage protagonists not aware of their current predicament. Importantly, the activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and the left anterior insula positively correlated with individual differences in trait empathy. The present findings establish the empathic process as a fundamental prerequisite for vicarious embarrassment experiences, thus connecting affect and cognition to interpersonal processes.
“When we are living with people who have a delicate sense of propriety, we are in misery on their account when anything unbecoming is committed. So I always feel for and with Charlotte when a person is tipping his chair. She cannot endure it.” [Elective Affinities, J. W. Goethe].
Statistical thresholding (i.e. P-values) in fMRI research has become increasingly conservative over the past decade in an attempt to diminish Type I errors (i.e. false alarms) to a level traditionally allowed in behavioral science research. In this article, we examine the unintended negative consequences of this single-minded devotion to Type I errors: increased Type II errors (i.e. missing true effects), a bias toward studying large rather than small effects, a bias toward observing sensory and motor processes rather than complex cognitive and affective processes and deficient meta-analyses. Power analyses indicate that the reductions in acceptable P-values over time are producing dramatic increases in the Type II error rate. Moreover, the push for a mapwide false discovery rate (FDR) of 0.05 is based on the assumption that this is the FDR in most behavioral research; however, this is an inaccurate assessment of the conventions in actual behavioral research. We report simulations demonstrating that combined intensity and cluster size thresholds such as P < 0.005 with a 10 voxel extent produce a desirable balance between Types I and II error rates. This joint threshold produces high but acceptable Type II error rates and produces a FDR that is comparable to the effective FDR in typical behavioral science articles (while a 20 voxel extent threshold produces an actual FDR of 0.05 with relatively common imaging parameters). We recommend a greater focus on replication and meta-analysis rather than emphasizing single studies as the unit of analysis for establishing scientific truth. From this perspective, Type I errors are self-erasing because they will not replicate, thus allowing for more lenient thresholding to avoid Type II errors.
Theories of empathy suggest that an accurate understanding of another's emotions should depend on affective, motor, and/or higher cognitive brain regions, but until recently no experimental method has been available to directly test these possibilities. Here, we present a functional imaging paradigm that allowed us to address this issue. We found that empathically accurate, as compared with inaccurate, judgments depended on (i) structures within the human mirror neuron system thought to be involved in shared sensorimotor representations, and (ii) regions implicated in mental state attribution, the superior temporal sulcus and medial prefrontal cortex. These data demonstrate that activity in these 2 sets of brain regions tracks with the accuracy of attributions made about another's internal emotional state. Taken together, these results provide both an experimental approach and theoretical insights for studying empathy and its dysfunction.
We discuss the effects of non-independence on region of interest (ROI) analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging data, which has recently been raised in a prominent article by Vul et al. We outline the problem of non-independence, and use a previously published dataset to examine the effects of non-independence. These analyses show that very strong correlations (exceeding 0.8) can occur even when the ROI is completely independent of the data being analyzed, suggesting that the claims of Vul et al. regarding the implausibility of these high correlations are incorrect. We conclude with some recommendations to help limit the potential problems caused by non-independence.
Humans appear to have an inherent prosocial tendency toward one another in that we often take pleasure in seeing others succeed.
This fact is almost certainly exploited by game shows, yet why watching others win elicits a pleasurable vicarious rewarding
feeling in the absence of personal economic gain is unclear. One explanation is that game shows use contestants who have similarities
to the viewing population, thereby kindling kin-motivated responses (for example, prosocial behavior). Using a game show–inspired
paradigm, we show that the interactions between the ventral striatum and anterior cingulate cortex subserve the modulation
of vicarious reward by similarity, respectively. Our results support studies showing that similarity acts as a proximate neurobiological
mechanism where prosocial behavior extends to unrelated strangers.
Classical fear conditioning has been used as a model paradigm to explain fear learning across species. In this paradigm, the
amygdala is known to play a critical role. However, classical fear conditioning requires first-hand experience with an aversive
event, which may not be how most fears are acquired in humans. It remains to be determined whether the conditioning model
can be extended to indirect forms of learning more common in humans. Here we show that fear acquired indirectly through social
observation, with no personal experience of the aversive event, engages similar neural mechanisms as fear conditioning. The
amygdala was recruited both when subjects observed someone else being submitted to an aversive event, knowing that the same
treatment awaited themselves, and when subjects were subsequently placed in an analogous situation. These findings confirm
the central role of the amygdala in the acquisition and expression of observational fear learning, and validate the extension
of cross-species models of fear conditioning to learning in a human sociocultural context. Our findings also provides new
insights into the relationship between learning from, and empathizing with, fearful others. This study suggests that indirectly
attained fears may be as powerful as fears originating from direct experiences.
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.
In a prior review involving a meta-analysis (Underwood & Moore, 1982), no relation between affective empathy and prosocial behavior was found. In this article, the literature relevant to this issue is reexamined. The studies were organized according to the method used to assess empathy. When appropriate, meta-analyses were computed. In contrast to the earlier review, low to moderate positive relations generally were found between empathy and both prosocial behavior and cooperative/socially competent behavior. The method of assessing empathy did influence the strength of the relations; picture/story measures of empathy were not associated with prosocial behavior, whereas nearly all other measures were. Several possible explanations for the pattern of findings are discussed, as are the implications of the findings.
This review proposes that implicit learning processes are the cognitive substrate of social intuition. This hypothesis is supported by (a) the conceptual correspondence between implicit learning and social intuition (nonverbal communication) and (b) a review of relevant neuropsychological (Huntington's and Parkinson's disease), neuroimaging, neurophysiological, and neuroanatomical data. It is concluded that the caudate and putamen, in the basal ganglia, are central components of both intuition and implicit learning, supporting the proposed relationship. Parallel, but distinct, processes of judgment and action are demonstrated at each of the social, cognitive, and neural levels of analysis. Additionally, explicit attempts to learn a sequence can interfere with implicit learning. The possible relevance of the computations of the basal ganglia to emotional appraisal, automatic evaluation, script processing, and decision making are discussed.
Research and theory on the role of emotion and regulation in morality have received considerable attention in the last decade. Much relevant work has concerned the role of moral emotions in moral behavior. Research on differences between embarrassment, guilt, and shame and their relations to moral behavior is reviewed, as is research on the association of these emotions with negative emotionality and regulation.
Recent issues concerning the role of such empathy-related responses as sympathy and personal distress to prosocial and antisocial behavior are discussed, as is the relation of empathy-related responding to situational and dispositional emotionality and regulation. The development and socialization of guilt, shame, and empathy also are discussed briefly. In addition, the role of nonmoral emotions (e.g. anger and sadness), including moods and dispositional differences in negative emotionality and its regulation, in morally relevant behavior, is reviewed.
A baseline or control state is fundamental to the understanding of most complex systems. Defining a baseline state in the human brain, arguably our most complex system, poses a particular challenge. Many suspect that left unconstrained, its activity will vary unpredictably. Despite this prediction we identify a baseline state of the normal adult human brain in terms of the brain oxygen extraction fraction or OEF. The OEF is defined as the ratio of oxygen used by the brain to oxygen delivered by flowing blood and is remarkably uniform in the awake but resting state (e.g., lying quietly with eyes closed). Local deviations in the OEF represent the physiological basis of signals of changes in neuronal activity obtained with functional MRI during a wide variety of human behaviors. We used quantitative metabolic and circulatory measurements from positron-emission tomography to obtain the OEF regionally throughout the brain. Areas of activation were conspicuous by their absence. All significant deviations from the mean hemisphere OEF were increases, signifying deactivations, and resided almost exclusively in the visual system. Defining the baseline state of an area in this manner attaches meaning to a group of areas that consistently exhibit decreases from this baseline, during a wide variety of goal-directed behaviors monitored with positron-emission tomography and functional MRI. These decreases suggest the existence of an organized, baseline default mode of brain function that is suspended during specific goal-directed behaviors.
Positron emission tomography (PET) was used to investigate the neural correlates of feeling sympathy for someone else (i.e. the affinity, association, or relationship between persons wherein whatever affects one similarly affects the other). While undergoing PET scans, subjects were presented with a series of video-clips showing individuals (who were semi-professional stage actors) telling sad and neutral stories, as if they had personally experienced them. These stories were told with either congruent or incongruent motor expression of emotion (MEE). At the end of each movie, subjects were asked to rate the mood of the communicator and also how likable they found that person. Watching sad stories versus neutral stories was associated with increased activity in emotion processing-related structures, as well as in a set of cortical areas that belong to a "shared representation" network, including the right inferior parietal cortex. Motor expression of emotion, regardless of the narrative content of the stories, resulted in a specific regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) increase in the left inferior frontal gyrus. The condition of mismatch between the narrative content of the stories and the motor expression of emotion elicited a significant skin conductance response and strong rCBF increase in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and superior frontal gyrus which are involved in dealing with social conflict. Taken together, these results are consistent with a model of feeling sympathy that relies on both the shared representation and the affective networks. Interestingly, this network was not activated when subjects watched inappropriate social behavior.
In diary studies, people provide frequent reports on the events and experiences of their daily lives. These reports capture the particulars of experience in a way that is not possible using traditional designs. We review the types of research questions that diary methods are best equipped to answer, the main designs that can be used, current technology for obtaining diary reports, and appropriate data analysis strategies. Major recent developments include the use of electronic forms of data collection and multilevel models in data analysis. We identify several areas of research opportunities: 1. in technology, combining electronic diary reports with collateral measures such as ambulatory heart rate; 2. in measurement, switching from measures based on between-person differences to those based on within-person changes; and 3. in research questions, using diaries to (a) explain why people differ in variability rather than mean level, (b) study change processes during major events and transitions, and (c) study interpersonal processes using dyadic and group diary methods.
There is disagreement in the literature about the exact nature of the phenomenon of empathy. There are emotional, cognitive, and conditioning views, applying in varying degrees across species. An adequate description of the ultimate and proximate mechanism can integrate these views. Proximately, the perception of an object's state activates the subject's corresponding representations, which in turn activate somatic and autonomic responses. This mechanism supports basic behaviors (e.g., alarm, social facilitation, vicariousness of emotions, mother-infant responsiveness, and the modeling of competitors and predators) that are crucial for the reproductive success of animals living in groups. The Perception-Action Model (PAM), together with an understanding of how representations change with experience, can explain the major empirical effects in the literature (similarity, familiarity, past experience, explicit teaching, and salience). It can also predict a variety of empathy disorders. The interaction between the PAM and prefrontal functioning can also explain different levels of empathy across species and age groups. This view can advance our evolutionary understanding of empathy beyond inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism and can explain different levels of empathy across individuals, species, stages of development, and situations.
Our ability to have an experience of another's pain is characteristic of empathy. Using functional imaging, we assessed brain
activity while volunteers experienced a painful stimulus and compared it to that elicited when they observed a signal indicating
that their loved one—present in the same room—was receiving a similar pain stimulus. Bilateral anterior insula (AI), rostral
anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), brainstem, and cerebellum were activated when subjects received pain and also by a signal
that a loved one experienced pain. AIand ACC activation correlated with individual empathy scores. Activity in the posterior
insula/secondary somatosensory cortex, the sensorimotor cortex (SI/MI), and the caudal ACC was specific to receiving pain.
Thus, a neural response in AIand rostral ACC, activated in common for “self” and “other” conditions, suggests that the neural
substrate for empathic experience does not involve the entire “pain matrix.” We conclude that only that part of the pain network
associated with its affective qualities, but not its sensory qualities, mediates empathy.
Empathy is an essential part of normal social functioning, yet there are precious few instruments for measuring individual differences in this domain. In this article we review psychological theories of empathy and its measurement. Previous instruments that purport to measure this have not always focused purely on empathy. We report a new self-report questionnaire, the Empathy Quotient (EQ), for use with adults of normal intelligence. It contains 40 empathy items and 20 filler/control items. On each empathy item a person can score 2, 1, or 0, so the EQ has a maximum score of 80 and a minimum of zero. In Study 1 we employed the EQ with n = 90 adults (65 males, 25 females) with Asperger Syndrome (AS) or high-functioning autism (HFA), who are reported clinically to have difficulties in empathy. The adults with AS/HFA scored significantly lower on the EQ than n = 90 (65 males, 25 females) age-matched controls. Of the adults with AS/HFA, 81% scored equal to or fewer than 30 points out of 80, compared with only 12% of controls. In Study 2 we carried out a study of n = 197 adults from a general population, to test for previously reported sex differences (female superiority) in empathy. This confirmed that women scored significantly higher than men. The EQ reveals both a sex difference in empathy in the general population and an empathy deficit in AS/HFA.
The lack of ability to emphathize is central to many psychiatric conditions. Empathy is affected by neurodevelopment, brain pathology and psychiatric illness. Empathy is both a state and a trait characteristic. Empathy is measurable by neuropsychological assessment and neuroimaging techniques. This book, first published in 2007, specifically focuses on the role of empathy in mental illness. It starts with the clinical psychiatric perspective and covers empathy in the context of mental illness, adult health, developmental course, and explanatory models. Psychiatrists, psychotherapists and mental heath professionals will find this a very useful reference for their work. © Cambridge University Press 2007 and Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Introduction Empathy, the ability or process ‘to identify with and understand another's situation, feelings and motives’ would initially appear an unlikely candidate for neuroimaging research. Being aware of, and interpreting, other's behaviour on an emotional level is likely to be recently evolved and hence a ‘high-level’ cognitive process. Such complex brain processes are generally considered as unlikely to have a dedicated brain region serving them, or to be easy to isolate for examination. This chapter will describe how empathy has been dissected into a set of component cognitive processes, how brain imaging researchers have designed experiments to examine various combinations of these components, and what these finding may tell us about empathy's neurophysiological basis. A neuroimaging primer It may be useful to begin by summarizing the field of neuroimaging, and highlighting which aspects may be of relevance. Structural neuroimaging concerns the physical size and integrity of brain tissue, and in as much as there may be a relationship between size and function, if we could identify brain regions which were part of an empathy system or circuit, then investigating their size or integrity may be informative (presuming that we can objectively measure subjects’ behavioural empathic levels). Functional neuroimaging utilizes surrogate markers (normally regional blood flow) to infer which parts of the brain are ‘active’ whilst a specific task or mental process is undertaken. © Cambridge University Press 2007 and Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Joint effects of daily events and dispositional sensitivities to cues of reward and punishment on daily positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) were examined in 3 diary studies. Study 1 showed that positive events were strongly related to PA but not NA, whereas negative events were strongly related to NA but not PA. Studies 2 and 3 examined how the dispositional sensitivities of independent appetitive and aversive motivational systems, the Behavioral Activation System (BAS) and the Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS), moderated these relationships. Participants in Study 2 with higher BAS sensitivity reported more PA on average; those with more sensitive BIS reported more NA. Also, BIS moderated reactions to negative events, such that higher BIS sensitivity magnified reactions to negative events. Study 3 replicated these findings and showed that BAS predisposed people to experience more positive events. Results demonstrate the value of distinguishing within-person and between-person effects to clarify the functionally independent processes by which dispositional sensitivities influence affect.
Pictures of either emotionally neutral, pleasant (affectionate), or unpleasant (threat and injury) scenes were paired with nonemotional control pictures and presented for 3 s, while eye fixations were monitored. Preferential attention to the emotional picture of eah pair occurred at an early processing stage: The probability of placement of the first fixation and the proportion of viewing time during the first 500 ms were higher for both pleasant and unpleasant pictures than for neutral pictures, whereas later fixation location and time were not differentially affected. This suggests that, when emotional and nonemotional stimuli are presented simultaneously, emotional meaning captures initial overt orienting and engages attention early, as measured by gaze direction and duration. The possibility that this effect could be accounted for by perceptual differences—such as luminance and complexity—between emotional and neutral pictures was ruled out.