Lecture | Simone Shamay-Tsoory | The Empathic Brain: The Neural Underpinning of Human Empathy

Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture

Empathy allows us to understand and share one another’s emotional experiences. It allows one to quickly and automatically relate to the emotional states of others, which is essential for the regulation of social interactions and cooperation toward shared goals. Behavioral and neuroimaging findings have led researchers to identify two broad types of empathic reactions. One is emotional empathy, which is characterized by feeling other people’s emotions. The other is cognitive empathy, which is characterized by understanding other people’s thoughts and motivations. Despite the developments in the study of empathy, the vast majority of empathy paradigms focus only on passive observers, carrying out artificial empathy tasks in socially deprived environments. This approach significantly limits our understanding of interactive aspects of empathy and how empathic responses affect the distress of the sufferer.

We recently proposed a brain model that characterizes how empathic reactions alleviate the distress of a target. In a series of experiments, we examined brain-to-brain coupling during empathic interactions. We show that, brain-to-brain coupling in the observation-execution (mirror) brain network increases in empathic interactions. Critically we found that brain-to-brain coupling predicts distress regulation in the target. We conclude that employing this multi-brain approach may provide a highly controlled setting in which to study social behavior in health and disease.