Empathy refers to the capacity to understand and respond to the unique affective experiences of another person. Knowledge of empathic behavior is essential for an understanding of human social and moral development. Current trends in empathy theory suggest that empathy involves two inter-related primary components: (a) an automatic affective response to another person, which often entails sharing that person?s emotional state; and (b) a cognitive capacity to take the perspective of the other person. Furthermore, these two components are experienced without confusing the self with the other. The basic mechanism for empathy rests on the ability to recognize that the self and other are similar, but also on an ability to differentiate between the two. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Jean Decety and colleagues at the University of Chicago will address the psychological and neural mechanisms involved in the experience of empathy by combining the approaches of cognitive neuroscience and social psychology. Neural activity during the experience of empathy will be compared across various situational and dispositional factors which are well documented in social psychology. Brain imaging (functional magnetic resonance imaging) will be used to measure the effects of stigma, racial bias, similarity and past shared experiences between self and others on the automatic resonance between self and other. There will be a special emphasis on the case of perception of pain, which has proven to be fairly universal and also typical of other processes. In all studies dispositional measures of individual differences in emotion contagion, empathy, sensitivity to pain, will be collected to allow for a fuller explication of the brain results.
This work will yield a better understanding of the cognitive and neurophysiological mechanisms involved in empathy and sympathy as well as several factors, seemingly unique to human kind, that influence or modulate our ability to share feelings and care for others. Both the findings and the techniques will be of value to clinicians as well as other researchers. This work will also contribute to teaching and training of students, especially interdisciplinary training between neuroscience and social psychology. Some of the proposed research will investigate the impact of racial group membership on the neural networks that mediate empathy and work on racial stereotypes and racial information processing has been an area of interest to undergraduate and graduate students from underrepresented minority groups. Thus this work may increase the attractiveness of neuroscience for students from these groups.
