[PDF] Human Empathy Through the Lens of Social Neuroscience | Semantic Scholar (2024)

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This work will integrate results of neuroscientific studies of the human ability to understand other people's intentions, beliefs, and experiences with findings on patients with Alexithymia and Autistic Spectrum Disorder to create a deeper understanding of the relations between interoceptive awareness, empathy, and cognitive perspective taking.

An in‐depth and critical discussion of the findings of recent studies showing that empathy is a highly flexible phenomenon, and that vicarious responses are malleable with respect to a number of factors.

Empathy, worry and rumination related to enhanced bottom-up processing, while worry, rumination and anxiety exhibited decreased top-down attentional control, suggesting an indirect relationship between empathy and anxiety through the ruminative tendencies of worry.

Empathy allows us to internally simulate the affective and cognitive mental states of others and available evidence indicates that empathic brain responses are likely to be influenced by several different modulating factors.

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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.

The view that humans' responses to the pain of others can be modulated by cognitive and motivational processes, which influence whether observing a conspecific in need of help will result in empathic concern, an important instigator for helping behavior, is supported.

The Perception-Action Model (PAM), together with an understanding of how representations change with experience, can explain the major empirical effects in the literature and can also predict a variety of empathy disorders.

There was greater activity during imitation, compared with observation of emotions, in premotor areas including the inferior frontal cortex, as well as in the superior temporal cortex, insula, and amygdala, which may be a critical relay from action representation to emotion.

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