There is disagreement in the literature about the exact nature of the phenomenon of empathy. There are emotional, cogni- tive, and conditioning views, applying in varying degrees across species. An adequate description of the ultimate and proximate mecha- nism can integrate these views. Proximately, the perception of an object's state activates the subject's corresponding representations, which in turn activate somatic and autonomic responses. This mechanism supports basic behaviors (e.g., alarm, social facilitation, vicar- iousness of emotions, mother-infant responsiveness, and the modeling of competitors and predators) that are crucial for the reproduc- tive success of animals living in groups. The Perception-Action Model (PAM), together with an understanding of how representations change with experience, can explain the major empirical effects in the literature (similarity, familiarity, past experience, explicit teach- ing, and salience). It can also predict a variety of empathy disorders. The interaction between the PAM and prefrontal functioning can also explain different levels of empathy across species and age groups. This view can advance our evolutionary understanding of empa- thy beyond inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism and can explain different levels of empathy across individuals, species, stages of de- velopment, and situations.

/pdf/empathy-its-ultimate-and-proximate-bases-3gnr9okjki.pdf

Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases.

Group emotional contagion, the transfer of moods among people in a group, and its influence on work group dynamics was examined in a laboratory study of managerial decision making using multiple, c...

/pdf/the-ripple-effect-emotional-contagion-and-its-influence-on-vlw4hrogs2.pdf

The Ripple Effect: Emotional Contagion and Its Influence on Group Behavior

Empathy accounts for the naturally occurring subjective experience of similarity between the feelings expressed by self and others without loosing sight of whose feelings belong to whom. 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. In light of multiple levels of analysis ranging from developmental psychology, social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical neuropsychology, this article proposes a model of empathy that 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 macrocomponents of empathy, which are underpinned by specific neural systems. This functional model may be used to make specific predictions about the various empathy deficits that can be encountered in different forms of social and neu...

The functional architecture of human empathy

Important advances have recently been made in studying emotions in infants and the nature of emotional communication between infants and adults. Infant emotions and emotional communications are far more organized than previously thought. Infants display a variety of discrete affective expressions that are appro- priate to the nature of events and their context. They also appreciate the emotional meaning of the affective displays of caretakers. The emotional expressions of the infant and the caretaker function to allow them to mutually regulate their interactions. Indeed, it appears that a major deter- minant of children's development is related to the oper- ation of this communication system. Positive development may be associated with the experience of coordinated in- teractions characterized by frequent reparations of inter- active errors and the transformation of negative affect into positive affect, whereas negative development appears to be associated with sustained periods of interactive failure and negative affect. How is it that some children become sad, withdrawn, and lacking in self-esteem, whereas others become angry, un- focused, and brittlely self-assertive, whereas still others become happy, curious, affectionate, and self-confident? As clinicians, researchers, and polieymakers, our goal must be to understand the processes that lead to these outcomes, not just to generate indexes of them, so that problematic and compromised developmental outcomes can be prevented and remediated. Although the nature of these processes is not yet known, an answer is taking shape on the basis of recent work on the nature of infant- caretaker emotional communication. The emerging answer is that the infant and adult are participants in an alfective communication system. A central hypothesis is that the operation of this system has a major influence on how well the infant accomplishes his or her goals, the emotions the infant experiences, and the infant's developmental outcome. If this hypothesis is correct, then the key issue is to understand how this sys- tem works. We need to explore the inextricable links among infant emotions and behavior, caretaker emotions and behavior, and the success, failure, and reparation of interactive errors that the infant experiences when striving to accomplish his or her goals. Two contrasting examples of infant-mother interaction drawn from the work of Brazelton (Brazelton, Koslowski, & Main, 1974) will serve as a base for the initial exploration of the functioning of this affective communication system. Imagine two infant-mother pairs playing the game of peek-a-boo. In the first, the infant abruptly turns away from his mother as the game reaches its "peek" of inten- sity and begins to suck on his thumb and stare into space with a dull facial expression. The mother stops playing and sits back watching her infant. After a few seconds the infant turns back to her with an interested and inviting expression. The mother moves closer, smiles, and says in a high-pitched, exaggerated voice, "Oh, now you're back!" He smiles in response and vocalizes. As they finish crow- ing together, the infant reinserts his thumb and looks away. The mother again waits. After a few seconds the infant turns back to her, and they greet each other with big smiles. Imagine a second similar situation except that after this infant turns away, she does not look back at her mother. The mother waits but then leans over into the infant's line of vision while clicking her tongue to attract her attention. The infant, however, ignores the mother and continues to look away. Undaunted, the mother per- sists and moves her head closer to the infant. The infant grimaces and fusses while she pushes at the mother's face. Within seconds she turns even further away from her mother and continues to suck on her thumb. I will not yet focus on the issue of who is responsible

/pdf/emotions-and-emotional-communication-in-infants-lyk1mc1oj9.pdf

Emotions and emotional communication in infants.

The affective primacy hypothesis (R. B. Zajonc, 1980) asserts that positive and negative affective reactions can be evoked with minimal stimulus input and virtually no cognitive processing. The present work tested this hypothesis by comparing the effects of affective and cognitive priming under extremely brief (suboptimal) and longer (optimal) exposure durations. At suboptimal exposures only affective primes produced significant shifts in Ss' judgments of novel stimuli. These results suggest that when affect is elicited outside of conscious awareness, it is diffuse and nonspecific, and its origin and address are not accessible. Having minimal cognitive participation, such gross and nonspecific affective reactions can therefore be diffused or displaced onto unrelated stimuli. At optimal exposures this pattern of results was reversed such that only cognitive primes produced significant shifts in judgments. Together, these results support the affective primacy hypothesis. The affective primacy hypothesis (Zajonc, 1980) holds that affective reactions can be elicited with minimal stimulus input. This hypothesis challenges the cognitive appraisal viewpoint (Lazarus, 1982), which maintains that affect cannot emerge without prior cognitive mediation. In this article, we provide evidence relevant to this debate and propose a theoretical model that describes how various stimuli can elicit an early affective reaction that may be sustained or diluted by subsequent cognitive operations. Affective primacy was first suggested by a mere exposure experiment (Kunst-Wilson & Zajonc, 1980) in which subjects, by virtue of repeated exposures, developed affective preferences for previously novel Chinese ideographs. In that experiment the ideographs were first presented under degraded viewing conditions. Later, when given direct recognition memory tests, subjects could not distinguish these old stimuli from new stimuli they had never seen. Yet, despite this lack of overt recognition, when asked which of two ideographs, old or new, they liked better, subjects consistently preferred the previously presented stimulus. Moreover, response time for the liking judgment was found to be significantly less than that for the direct recognition judgment (see Seamon, Brody, & Kauff, 1983, for an extension of these data).

/pdf/affect-cognition-and-awareness-affective-priming-with-55zh9sy47q.pdf

Affect, cognition, and awareness: affective priming with optimal and suboptimal stimulus exposures.

Human neonates (average age, 36 hours) discriminated three facial expressions (happy, sad, and surprised) posed by a live model as evidenced by diminished visual fixation on each face over trials and renewed fixations to the presentation of a different face. The expressions posed by the model, unseeen by the observer, were guessed at greater than chance accuracy simply by observing the face of the neonate, whose facial movements in the brow, eyes, and mouth regions provided evidence for imitation of the facial expressions.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/218/4568/179.full.pdf

Discrimination and imitation of facial expression by neonates

Newborn infants discriminate their mother's face from the face of a stranger shortly after birth. The neonates (M age=45 hours) showed an initial preference for their mother's face. The mother's face (or face and voice) was then presented to the neonates for repeated trials until the infant reached an habituation criterion. In a subsequent discrimination test the infants looked significantly longer at the stranger's face, suggesting that the mother's face was discriminated after very limited experience. Although voice cues were not required for this discrimination, the possibility remains that other cues, such as the mother's odor, may facilitate the discrimination of her face.

Mother-stranger face discrimination by the newborn

Discrimination and imitation of facial expressions by term and preterm neonates.

The leave-taking and reunion behaviors of infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and their parents were observed as the children were "dropped off" and "picked up" at their nursery school each day. On arrival at their classroom, infants and toddlers related primarily to their parents, whereas preschoolers related to their teachers. Girls more frequently engaged in interaction with their teachers, and boys more frequently approached the children's play activities. Distress behaviors during the parents' departures were most frequently shown by toddlers, and the toddlers' parents hovered about them and " sneaked out of the room" more frequently. Children dropped off by mothers versus fathers showed more attention-getting behavior and crying, and mothers versus fathers engaged in more "distracting-the-child" behaviors and showed a longer latency to leave the classroom. During the second semester of observations parents and children spent less time relating to each other during leave-taking, children protested the departures less frequently, and the parents left the classroom more quickly. Regression analyses on distress behaviors during leave- takings and ambivalent behavior during reunions suggested that parent behaviors such as verbal explanation, distracting the child, latency to leave, and " sneaking out of the room" were correlated with children's distress and leave-taking distress was related to ambivalent behavior at reunion.

Leave-takings and reunions of infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and their parents.

The facial expressions of 96 term and preterm neonates were recorded during the Brazelton Neonatal Behavior Assessment. The expressions that occurred most frequently during the neurological reflex items were interest, disgust, sadness, and crying. The predominant facial expression during the orienting items was that of interest. Although happy and surprised faces were more common during the orienting than the reflex items, they occurred very infrequently. Some of the reflex items elicited more negative expressions than others and some of the orienting items elicited more frequent expressions than others and some of the orienting items elicited more frequent expressions of interest than others, suggesting that facial expressions might reflect the degree to which the stimuli were experienced as pleasant or unpleasant and more or less interesting. Although the examiner's face and voice were more effective than inanimate stimuli in eliciting positive expressions in term neonates, the reverse was true for preterm neonates. Thus facial expressions may provide additional information on the degree to which neonates experience stimulation as pleasant/unpleasant and on individual differences in responsiveness to physical and social stimulation.

Debra Cohen

Papers

Discrimination and imitation of facial expression by neonates

Mother-stranger face discrimination by the newborn

Discrimination and imitation of facial expressions by term and preterm neonates.

Leave-takings and reunions of infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and their parents.

A descriptive study of facial expressions during Brazelton Neonatal Behavior Assessments