Man or Monkey? Empathy predicts species category boundary judgements

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event Man or Monkey? Empathy predicts species category boundary judgements Anna Brooks1* and Natalie Doring1 1 Southern Cross University, Psychology, Australia Empathic capacity – the extent to which an individual responds vicariously to the emotional status of non-self agents – relates to perceived similarity. Specifically, stronger empathic responses are associated with higher levels of perceived similarity (Gallese 2001). In line with this, we tested whether empathy and performance on a vision-based category boundary task are related. Participants judged species membership (or not) of individual images taken from a human/monkey continuum (Sigala et al 2011). They then completed an empathy scale. Data show that for female participants, empathic capacity predicted performance on the perceptual task. In particular, high empathy women accepted images with low levels of target signal as belonging to the species of interest. Implications of this first demonstration of a systematic relationship between empathic capacity and vision-based category boundary judgements are discussed. References Gallese V. The 'Shared Manifold' Hypothesis: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8(5-7), 33-50. Sigala R., Logothetis N.K. & Rainer G. (2011) Own-species bias in the representations of monkey and human face categories in the primate temporal lobe, Journal of Neurophysiology, 105, 2749-2752. Keywords: Empathy, category, Visual Perception, Social Behavior, judgement Conference: ACNS-2013 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference, Clayton, Melbourne, Australia, 28 Nov - 1 Dec, 2013. Presentation Type: Poster Topic: Emotion and Social Citation: Brooks A and Doring N (2013). Man or Monkey? Empathy predicts species category boundary judgements. Conference Abstract: ACNS-2013 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2013.212.00098 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 25 Sep 2013; Published Online: 25 Nov 2013. * Correspondence: Dr. Anna Brooks, Southern Cross University, Psychology, Coffs Harbour, NSW, 2450, Australia, anna.brooks@scu.edu.au Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Anna Brooks Natalie Doring Google Anna Brooks Natalie Doring Google Scholar Anna Brooks Natalie Doring PubMed Anna Brooks Natalie Doring Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.