Abstract
The neuroscience of empathy has enormously expanded in the past two decades, thereby making instrumental progress for the understanding of neural substrates involved in affective and cognitive aspects of empathy. Yet, these conclusions have relied on ultrasimplified tasks resulting in the affective/cognitive dichotomy that was often modeled and overemphasized in pathological, developmental, and genetic studies of empathy. As such, the affective/cognitive model of empathy could not straightforwardly accommodate and explain the recent surge of neuroscientific data obtained from studies employing naturalistic approaches and intergroup conditions. Inspired by phenomenological philosophy, this article paves the way for a new scientific perspective on empathy that breaks thorough the affective/cognitive dichotomy. This neuro-phenomenological account leans on phenomenological analyses and can straightforwardly explain recent neuroscience data. It emphasizes the dynamic, subjective, and piecemeal features of empathic experiences and unpicks the graded nature of empathy. The graded empathy hypothesis postulates that attending to others' expressions always facilitates empathy, but the parametric modulation in the levels of the empathic experience varies as a function of one's social interest (e.g., via intergroup or inter-personal cues) in the observed other. Drawing on multiple resources that integrate neuroscience with phenomenology, we describe the potential of this graded framework in an era of real-life experimentation. By wearing lenses of neuro-phenomenology, this original perspective can change the way empathy is considered.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Social Cognition, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry
The neuroscience of empathy has enormously expanded in the past two decades, thereby making instrumental progress for the understanding of neural substrates involved in affective and cognitive aspects of empathy. These conclusions have relied on ultrasimplified tasks resulting in the affective/cognitive dichotomy that was often modeled and overemphasized in pathological, developmental, and genetic studies of empathy
For phenomenologists, empathy is not restricted to a basic sensory–motor attunement, but can extend to higher layers of interpersonal understanding [6, 7] that unfold as a function of the social situation at hand [8, 9]; this will be detailed
Summary
Empathy is a multifaceted phenomenon with several meanings depending on the context and discipline in which it is used. At the onset of the second decade of this millennium, a gradual emergence of naturalistic experimental settings began to establish in the cognitive and social neurosciences [47, 48], including in the neuroscience of empathy [44] This paradigm shift gradually conveyed the notion that this dichotomy is somewhat artificial and overestimates the dual distinction in live empathic encounters that are dynamic and interactive. Levy et al investigated the impact of intergroup representations on neural empathy and empathic behavior; the study found that empathy brain response was expressed by various rhythmic events occurring at different timings, and was amplified and synchronized as a function of intergroup representations and the emotions that they arose [46] These findings were hard to accommodate by the dichotomous model of empathy, and attempting to do so would miss important facets of the data. Inspired by a recent phenomenological outlook on levels of empathy that we describe we contend that a new neuro-phenomenological framework is needed to accommodate the methodological paradigm shift and the necessity to integrate empirical measures with lived experiences
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