Abstract
Empathy is a crucial human ability, because of its importance to prosocial behavior, and for moral development. A deficit in empathic abilities, especially affective empathy, is thought to play an important role in psychopathic personality. Empathic abilities have traditionally been studied within the social and behavioral sciences using behavioral methods, but recent work in neuroscience has begun to elucidate the neural underpinnings of empathic processing in relation to psychopathy. In this review, current knowledge in the social neuroscience of empathy is discussed and a comprehensive view of the neuronal mechanisms that underlie empathy in psychopathic personality is provided. Furthermore, it will be argued that using classification based on overt behavior, we risk failing to identify important mechanisms involved in the psychopathology of psychopathy. In the last decade, there is a growing attention in combining knowledge from (neuro)biological research areas with psychology and psychiatry, to form a new basis for categorizing individuals. Recently, a converging framework has been put forward that applies such approach to antisocial individuals, including psychopathy. In this bio-cognitive approach, it is suggested to use information from different levels, to form latent categories on which individuals are grouped, that may better reflect underlying (neurobiological) dysfunctions. Subsequently, these newly defined latent categories may be more effective in guiding interventions and treatment. In conclusion, in my view, the future understanding of the social brain of psychopaths lies in studying the complex networks in the brain in combination with the use of other levels of information (e.g., genetics and cognition). Based on that, profiles of individuals can be formed that can be used to guide neurophysiological informed personalized treatment interventions that ultimately reduce violent transgressions in individuals with psychopathic traits.
Highlights
Empathy is seen as the “natural capacity to share, understand, and respond with care to the affective states of others” (Decety, 2012)
Over centuries of literature on empathy has shown that empathy is sometimes confused with, or used interchangeably with other concepts, such as sympathy and compassion
Approaches that incorporate neuroscience, such as the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC; Insel et al, 2010), have emerged already in the nineteenth century (Arzy and Danziger, 2014). These approaches have not been applied to the study of psychopathic personality only until a couple of years ago (Blair, 2015a,b; Brazil et al, 2018). The idea behind these approaches is that mental disorders are originally classified based on behavioral symptoms (e.g., DSM criteria), but that, during the last decades, it has become increasingly apparent that these disorders consist of dysfunctional bio-cognitive processes related to different processes at the neural level
Summary
Empathy is seen as the “natural capacity to share, understand, and respond with care to the affective states of others” (Decety, 2012). These approaches have not been applied to the study of psychopathic personality only until a couple of years ago (Blair, 2015a,b; Brazil et al, 2018) The idea behind these approaches is that mental disorders are originally classified based on behavioral symptoms (e.g., DSM criteria), but that, during the last decades, it has become increasingly apparent that these disorders consist of dysfunctional bio-cognitive processes related to different processes at the neural level. Elucidation of the neural underpinnings of empathy will help us understand social interactions, and help us understand the neural and cognitive mechanisms of emotion processing, motivation (i.e., empathic concern), and individual differences in antisocial and psychopathic personality. Given the complexity of the experience of empathy, it is important to first break down this construct into component processes
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