Lecture 12b: Clinical Neuroscience II - Empathy

Empathy Definition and Context

• Empathy: Difficult to precisely define, but basic interpretations include:

  • The ability to recognize what another person is thinking.

  • The ability to understand what another person is feeling.

  • The ability to care about what another person is thinking or feeling.

Emotional States

• Types of Emotions:

  • Positive Emotions: Happiness, Joy, Surprise.

  • Social Emotions: Empathy, Guilt, Shame.

  • Negative Emotions: Fear, Anxiety, Sadness.

• Differences:

  • Positive and Negative emotions can be experienced alone (e.g., happiness, sadness) without the involvement of another person.

  • Social emotions (Empathy, Guilt, Shame) require another person to be present in the context.

Characteristics of Social Emotions

• Cannot experience empathy, guilt, or shame in isolation; they require societal context.

• Empathy: Slightly positive, aiding social bonds; contrasted with guilt and shame, which typically have negative connotations.

Components of Empathy

• Emotional Contagion: The tendency to catch and feel emotions that are similar to and influenced by those of others

• Perspective Taking: The recognition or understanding component of empathy; the ability to see something from another’s perspective

• Empathic Concern: The caring component of empathy; the feeling for the other person’s circumstance

Emotional Contagion and Mirror Neurons

• Mirror neurons

  • Have been identified that activate similarily to the performance and observation of various motor patterns

  • Suggests the possibility of shared neural circuitry for performed and observed actions

    • May serve as the basis for perspective taking/empathic concern

    • May serve as the basis for observation learning

• Studies show shared brain activation patterns for self-pain and observed pain in others, particularly in affective areas rather than sensorimotor areas, indicating a neural basis for empathy.

Research Findings

• Studies demonstrate similar dACC (dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex) activity during:

  • Performance of own errors and observation of others' errors.

• Correlation between empathic concern in participants and vACC (ventral Anterior Cingulate Cortex) activity during the observation of failures in others.

  • Higher empathic concern is related to greater brain responses in these regions.

Psychopathy and Empathy

• Research indicates different responses in individuals with psychopathy:

  • Reduced dACC response to others' errors indicating lack of empathy.

  • Correlations between self-reported psychopathy scores and brain responses related to empathy tasks, highlighting diminished empathic responses in psychopathic individuals.

The Components of Empathy

• Psychopathy: Normal emotion contagion and perspective taking, and reduced empathic concern

• Autism: Reduced emotional contagion and perspective taking, normal empathic concern