Journal ArticleDOI
The neuroevolution of empathy.
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TLDR
Empathy in humans is assisted by other domain‐general high‐level cognitive abilities, such as executive functions, mentalizing, and language, which expand the range of behaviors that can be driven by empathy.Abstract:
There is strong evidence that empathy has deep evolutionary, biochemical, and neurological underpinnings. Even the most advanced forms of empathy in humans are built on more basic forms and remain connected to core mechanisms associated with affective communication, social attachment, and parental care. Social neuroscience has begun to examine the neurobiological mechanisms that instantiate empathy, especially in response to signals of distress and pain, and how certain dispositional and contextual moderators modulate its experience. Functional neuroimaging studies document a circuit that responds to the perception of others' distress. Activation of this circuit reflects an aversive response in the observer, and this information may act as a trigger to inhibit aggression or prompt motivation to help. Moreover, empathy in humans is assisted by other domain-general high-level cognitive abilities, such as executive functions, mentalizing, and language, which expand the range of behaviors that can be driven by empathy.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in Rats
TL;DR: Rats behave pro-socially in response to a conspecific’s distress, providing strong evidence for biological roots of empathically motivated helping behavior.
Journal ArticleDOI
Oxytocin Pathways and the Evolution of Human Behavior
TL;DR: Oxytocin dynamically moderates the autonomic nervous system, and effects of oxytocin on vagal pathways, as well as the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects of this peptide, help to explain the pervasive adaptive consequences of social behavior for emotional and physical health.
Journal ArticleDOI
Mirror neurons: from origin to function
TL;DR: It is argued that mirror neurons are forged by domain-general processes of associative learning in the course of individual development, and, although they may have psychological functions, they do not necessarily have a specific evolutionary purpose or adaptive function.
Journal ArticleDOI
Empathy in Clinical Practice: How Individual Dispositions, Gender, and Experience Moderate Empathic Concern, Burnout, and Emotional Distress in Physicians
TL;DR: Physicians who have difficulty regulating their negative arousal and describing and identifying emotions seem to be more prone to emotional exhaustion, detachment, and a low sense of accomplishment, while the ability to engage in self-other awareness and regulate one’s emotions, seem to contribute to the sense of compassion that comes from assisting patients in clinical practice.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Contribution of Emotion and Cognition to Moral Sensitivity: A Neurodevelopmental Study
TL;DR: The findings support the view that negative emotion alerts the individual to the moral salience of a situation by bringing discomfort and thus can serve as an antecedent to moral judgment.
References
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Book
The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the role of reflection in the analysis of experience, experimentation and experiential analysis, and define the enactive approach, enactive cognitive science.
Book
Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions
TL;DR: In this article, a conceptual framework for the neurobiological analysis of affect is presented, based on the concepts of affective neuroscience and affective operating systems, and subjectivity.
Journal ArticleDOI
Empathy for Pain Involves the Affective but not Sensory Components of Pain
TL;DR: Only that part of the pain network associated with its affective qualities, but not its sensory qualities, mediates empathy, suggesting that the neural substrate for empathic experience does not involve the entire "pain matrix".
Journal ArticleDOI
Oxytocin increases trust in humans
TL;DR: It is shown that intranasal administration of oxytocin, a neuropeptide that plays a key role in social attachment and affiliation in non-human mammals, causes a substantial increase in trust among humans, thereby greatly increasing the benefits from social interactions.
Journal ArticleDOI
The functional architecture of human empathy
Jean Decety,Philip L. Jackson +1 more
TL;DR: A model of empathy that involves parallel and distributed processing in a number of dissociable computational mechanisms is proposed and may be used to make specific predictions about the various empathy deficits that can be encountered in different forms of social and neurological disorders.