Abstract
Existing theories of empathic response to visual art works postulate the primacy of automatic embodied reaction to images based on mirror neuron mechanisms. Arguing for a more inclusive concept of empathy-related response and integrating four distinct bodies of literature, we discuss contextual, and personal factors which modulate empathic response to depicted people. We then present an integrative model of empathy-related responses to depicted people in art works. The model assumes that a response to empathy-eliciting figural artworks engages the dynamic interaction of two mutually interlinked sets of processes: socio-affective/cognitive processing, related to the person perception, and esthetic processing, primarily concerned with esthetic appreciation and judgment and attention to non-social aspects of the image. The model predicts that the specific pattern of interaction between empathy-related and esthetic processing is co-determined by several sets of factors: (i) the viewer's individual characteristics, (ii) the context variables (which include various modes of priming by narratives and other images), (iii) multidimensional features of the image, and (iv) aspects of a viewer's response. Finally we propose that the model is implemented by the interaction of functionally connected brain networks involved in socio-cognitive and esthetic processing.
Highlights
Empathy-related phenomena occupy a central place in contemporary neuropsychology and social and affective neuroscience
The crucial importance of art expertise for esthetic processing has been amply documented (e.g., Pihko et al, 2011; Leder et al, 2012; Pang et al, 2013; Else et al, 2015). Based on these and other findings, we suggest that the individual profile of empathic response to a work of art will depend on the interaction of five factors: first, the individual characteristics of the subject; second, the subject’s dispositional empathy (Davis, 1983), defined as the viewer’s responsiveness to the observed experiences of others, has been found to correlate with the frequency and magnitude of empathic response (Davis, 1996; Avenanti et al, 2009); third, the subject’s cultural-cognitive competence in relation to the experiential situation; fourth, the intergroup empathy bias, that is, the perceived closeness and relationship to the person or people depicted; and fifth, the momentary psychosomatic state of the observer
Having discussed several critical factors relating to empathic response to figural depiction, we turn to outlining an integrated model of empathy-related response to figural art work
Summary
Empathy-related phenomena occupy a central place in contemporary neuropsychology and social and affective neuroscience. This research agenda, spurred both by the rapid spread of neuroimaging, and new conceptual models, has been accompanied in the past two decades by the rediscovery of empathy in the humanities, in art history and theory and in film studies In itself, this rediscovery can be set within the larger context of what might loosely be termed the “bodily” and the “emotional” turn in the humanities and social sciences (Papoulias and Callard, 2010; Lanzoni, 2012). Many works of visual art engage and facilitate complex emotional and empathic reactions, thereby potentially serving as a testing ground for such complex reactions in real-life situations
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