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[Vol.22 No.1 contents]
Japanese/English
Full Text of this Articlein English PDF (181K) |
| ArticleTitle | Human empathy |
| Language | E |
| AuthorList | Jean Decety |
| Affiliation | Social Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Chicago |
| Publication | Japanese Journal of Neuropsychology: 22 (1), 11-33, 2006 |
| Received | |
| Accepted | |
| Abstract | The psychological construct of empathy refers to an emotional response that emanates from the emotional state of another individual without loosing sight of whose feelings belong to whom. This response is contingent on cognitive as well as emotional factors. Empathy involves not only the affective experience of the other person's actual or inferred emotional state but also some minimal recognition and understanding of another's emotional state. Drawing on cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychological data, I propose that empathy involves parallel and distributed processing in a number of dissociable computational mechanisms. Shared neural representations, self-awareness, mental flexibility and emotion regulation constitute the basic macro-components of empathy, which are underpinned by specific and interacting neural systems. Furthermore, this model of empathy is consistent with the view that social cognition draws on both domain-general mechanisms and domain-specific embodied representations. |
| Keywords | social cognition, shared representations, emotion regulation, self-awareness, empathy, cognitive neuroscience |
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