The Neural Bases for Empathy

Abstract

Human empathy relies on the ability to share emotions as well as the ability to understand the other's thoughts, desires, and feelings. Recent evidence points to 2 separate systems for empathy: an emotional system that supports our ability to empathize emotionally and a cognitive system that involves cognitive understanding of the other's perspective. Converging evidence from neuroimaging and lesion studies shows that a neural network that includes the inferior frontal gyrus and the inferior parietal lobule is necessary for emotion recognition and emotional contagion. On the other hand, the involvement of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal junction, and the medial temporal lobe in self-reflection and autobiographical memory places these key regions as necessary for cognitive empathy. The proposed dissociation between these systems is supported by recent neurochemical experiments involving administration of oxytocin as well as by ethological, psychiatric, and developmental studies. Finally, although the emotional and cognitive systems appear to work independently, every empathic response may still evoke both components to some extent, depending on the social context.

Oxytocin pathways in the intergenerational transmission of maternal early life stress

“…These findings indicate that OT may selectively attenuate reactivity in limbic structures involved in stress and anxiety (amygdala), while simultaneously enhancing activity of dopaminergic motivational circuits that underlie reward learning and parenting behaviors (VTA). In addition, OT may contribute to enhanced emotion recognition of salient infant social cues through increased activation of specific brain regions (insula and inferior frontal gyrus) that are part of the empathy related brain network (Shamay-Tsoory, 2011). It should be acknowledged, however, that imaging studies using intranasal OT challenge are controversial (Leng and Ludwig, 2015).…”

Social Cognition, Negative Symptoms and Psychosocial Functioning in Schizophrenia

“…This ability is also referred to as mentalizing, mental state attribution, or cognitive empathy [51]. Research in this field has used tasks like: Adult Faux Pas [52], Brune Picture Sequencing Task [53], Happe's Stories [54], Reading the Mind in the Eyes further study.…”

“…Empathy refers to sharing, understanding and responding to the emotional experiences of another person, depending on multiple components of social cognition and is viewed as an example of integration among social processing systems [51,73]. Both experience sharing and mentalizing are included in most models of empathy [24,51], and some models also emphasize the role of emotion regulation as a way to modulate an empathic response when it becomes maladaptive [74]. It was shown that patients with schizophrenia have impairments in monitoring the emotions of others, suggesting that they do exhibit problems in complex social-cognitive abilities such as empathy [75,76].…”

Ethanol Increases Mechanical Pain Sensitivity in Rats via Activation of GABAA Receptors in Medial Prefrontal Cortex

“…Empathy, a basic prosocial behavior, reflects the natural ability to feel, understand, and share the emotional states of others and is generally divided into emotional (affective) empathy and cognitive empathy [54][55][56][57][58]. Experimental human and animal studies have demonstrated that observing intimates in pain (cagemates for animals) heightens an individual's pain perception, referred to as empathy for pain [15,54,[59][60][61][62][63].…”