The Social Neuroscience of Empathy
edited by Jean Decety and William Ickes
A Bradford Book
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The social neuroscience of empathy / edited by Jean Decety and William Ickes.
p. cm.—(Social neuroscience)
“A Bradford book.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-01297-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Empathy. 2. Neurosciences. 3. Social
psychology. I. Decety, Jean. II. Ickes, William John.
BF575.E55S63 2009
155.2′32—dc22
2008034814
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Introduction: Seeking to Understand the Minds (and Brains) of People
Who Are Seeking to Understand Other People’s Minds
After decades as the cultivated interest of scholars in philosophy and in clinical and developmental
psychology, empathy research is suddenly everywhere! Seemingly overnight it
has blossomed into a vibrant, multidisciplinary fi eld of study and has crossed the boundaries
of clinical and developmental psychology to plant its roots fi rmly in the soil of personality
and social psychology, mainstream cognitive psychology, and cognitive-affective
neuroscience.
To account for the recent explosion of empathy research, we must trace its growth to
roots that are less obvious but even deeper than those mentioned so far: the study of the
capacity for empathy in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. As Sue Carter,
James Harris, and Stephen Porges argue in chapter 13 of the present volume, the capacity
for empathy in humans and their progenitor species developed over millions of years of
evolutionary history, in ways that are only now becoming clear. Although it is impossible
to travel back in time and observe these developments directly, the evidence for them is
available in the neuroanatomical continuities and differences that can be observed across
the phylogenetic spectrum.
Given the long evolutionary history of the capacity for empathy, there is some irony in
the fact that the word empathy has a relatively short history, being not much more than a
hundred years old (see Ickes, 2003, chap. 4). Not only is empathy a rather recent construct,
but it is a complicated one that, from its very introduction, has been used by different
writers in very different ways.
It is appropriate, therefore, that an interdisciplinary book such as this one begin with a
critical examination of the concept of empathy and the range of different meanings it has
acquired to date. Accordingly, in chapter 1 Daniel Batson examines eight conceptually distinct
phenomena that have all been labeled “empathy” and calls for a more theoretically
coherent articulation of this important construct.
The second part of this volume vividly illustrates the divergent views of empathy that
Batson has noted by presenting empathy variously as emotional contagion based on unconscious
mimicry (chapters 2 and 3); as the projection of one’s own thoughts and feelings
onto others (chapter 4); as the ability to accurately infer another person’s thoughts and
feelings (chapter 5); as a complex affective-inferential process that often translates into
prosocial behavior (chapter 6); and as a fundamental aspect of social development that
contemporary educators should urgently promote (chapter 7).
The third part of this volume offers a range of clinical perspectives on empathy. It begins
with a review of the role of empathy in the Rogerian client-centered perspective (chapter 8),
continues with a dialogical view of how empathy is achieved during psychotherapy
(chapter 9); then explores the concept of empathic resonance from a neuroscience perspective
(chapter 10); links empathy to the study of morality and social convention (chapter 11);
and examines the role of empathy in people’s reactions to others in pain (chapter 12).
The fourth and fi nal part of this volume explores the deepest and oldest roots of empathy
by examining its evolutionary history and its neuroanatomical history. Chapter 13 provides
an evolutionary view of empathy that focuses on how emotional and visceral states infl uence
how we feel about and react to others and thus affect our capacity for empathy. Chapter
14 focuses more specifi cally on the mirror neuron system, arguing that it provides a neural
and behavioral foundation for interpersonal understanding. Chapter 15 shows how recent
work in the area of cognitive-affective neuroscience has enabled researchers to identify a
clear distinction between empathy and personal distress in terms of the different neural
substrates that underlie the two phenomena. Finally, Chapter 16, noting the defi cits in
empathic behavior that are observed following brain damage, proposes that empathy
involves separate, albeit interacting, brain networks.
The new discipline of social neuroscience is exciting because it integrates, builds upon,
and challenges more traditional approaches. For example, theories in social psychology
provide important guidelines for investigating the information-processing mechanisms that
underlie empathy and determine their neural instantiation. The social neuroscience approach
can also help to disambiguate competing social theories; in the domain of empathy; for
instance, this approach has been used to validate at a neurological level the distinction
between personal distress and empathic concern. Finally, the social neuroscience approach
has led some theorists to challenge existing beliefs—for example, the notion that there are
domain-specifi c “theory of mind” modules in the brain. Alternative accounts (Decety &
Lamm, 2007; Stone & Gerrans, 2007) argue that (a) elementary computational operations
have evolved to perform social functions, and (b) evolution has constructed layers of increasing
complexity, from nonrepresentational to representational and meta-representational
mechanisms, which may be suffi cient to provide a complete understanding of human social
cognition.
The present book is not, and cannot be, the fi nal word on empathy research. It does,
however, seek to provide the reader with a representative sampling of current, stateof-
the-art knowledge about empathy—knowledge that draws from contemporary work
in biology, developmental psychology, cognitive-affective neuroscience and neuropsychology,
social and cognitive psychology, and the more applied disciplines of clinical and health
psychology.
viii Introduction
A hallmark of the newest of these disciplines, the emerging fi eld of social neuroscience,
is its use of methods that bridge a variety of disciplines and levels of analysis. We hope that
the reader will, like us, be excited by the potential for cross-disciplinary integration that
the study of social neuroscience promises. We also hope that the chapters in this
book will stimulate even more sharing of ideas and collaboration in research between the
different academic domains that actively pursue the study of empathy.
References
Decety, J., & Lamm, C. (2007). The role of the right temporoparietal junction in social interaction:
How low-level computational processes contribute to meta-cognition. Neuroscientist, 13, 580–593.
Ickes, W. (2003). Everyday mind reading: Understanding what other people think and feel. Amherst, NY:
Prometheus Books.
Stone, V. E., & Gerrans, P. (2007). What’s domain-specifi c about theory of mind. Social Neuroscience,
1 (2–4), 309–319.
Introduction ix
