Abstract
First- and third-person experiences of bodily sensations, like pain and touch, recruit overlapping neural networks including sensorimotor, insular, and anterior cingulate cortices. Here we illustrate the peculiar role of these structures in coding the sensory and affective qualities of the observed bodily sensations. Subsequently we show that such neural activity is critically influenced by a range of social, emotional, cognitive factors, and importantly by inter-individual differences in the separate components of empathic traits. Finally we suggest some fundamental issues that social neuroscience has to address for providing a comprehensive knowledge of the behavioral, functional and anatomical brain correlates of empathy.
Highlights
We refer to empathy as that fundamental process in human social interactions that allows the understanding of others people sensations and emotions by sharing their sensory and affective states
Numerous scholars suggested that empathy comprises several components and independent but interacting mechanisms (Davis, 1996; Eisenberg, 2000; Decety and Jackson, 2004), such as sensory-affective and emotional sharing (Preston and de Waal, 2002), cognitive perspective taking of others’ states (Davis, 1996; Decety and Jackson, 2004), the ability to discern the other as the source of our own affective state and selfregulatory mechanisms that influence the extent of the empathic experience and the likelihood of prosocial behaviors
Social neuroscience has only recently started to investigate the neural underpinnings of empathy being strongly influenced by the shared representation accounts which postulate that the human ability to understand others’ motor, perceptual, and emotional states is sub-served by the activation of corresponding representations in the observer (Preston and de Waal, 2002; Gallese, 2003)
Summary
Reviewed by: Sjoerd Ebisch, G. d’Annunzio University, Italy Michael Schaefer, Charité University Berlin, Germany. First- and third-person experiences of bodily sensations, like pain and touch, recruit overlapping neural networks including sensorimotor, insular, and anterior cingulate cortices. We illustrate the peculiar role of these structures in coding the sensory and affective qualities of the observed bodily sensations. We show that such neural activity is critically influenced by a range of social, emotional, cognitive factors, and importantly by inter-individual differences in the separate components of empathic traits. We suggest some fundamental issues that social neuroscience has to address for providing a comprehensive knowledge of the behavioral, functional and anatomical brain correlates of empathy
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