Empathic Brain

By age 2 children clearly show

awareness of the difference between thoughts in the mind and things in the world

Jin and Baillargeon(2017)

17 month old infants first watched third-party interactions among unfamiliar adults identified as belonging to the same group, to different groups, or to unspecified groups. Next, one adults needed help, and another adult either did or did not provide it. Infants expected help to be provided when two adults belonged to the same group, but held no expectation when the adults belonged to different groups or to unspecified groups. Infants thus seem to possess an abstract expectation of in-group support.

For example, moderate levels of empathic concern (indicated by facial expressions, vocalizations, and gesturesreflecting concern) and attempts to explore and comprehend the others' distress are already present at what age?

8-10 months

Decety, J. Meidenbauer, K. L., & Cowell, J. M. (2017). The development of cognitive empathy and concern in preschool children: A behavioral neuroscience investigation.

Across early development, children exhibited enhanced N2 to pain when engaging in empathic concern. Greater pain-elicited N2 responses in the cognitive empathy condition also related to parent dispositional empathy. Children's own prosocial behavior was predicted by several individual differences in neural function, including larger early LPP responses during cognitive empathy and greater differentiation in late LPP and slow wave responses to empathic concern versus affective perspective taking

Decety, Echols, and Correll

Affect sharing is moderated by implicit attitudes towards others

Cuddy, Rock, and Norton

Attribution of complex emotions to out-group: Mother lost child in Hurricane Katrina(race affected perception)

What is the Core affect

Basic, primitive state that can be described by two properties: hedonic valence(pleasure/displeasure) and arousal(activation/sleepy)

Why do we enjoy ripe fruits(ultimate cause)

Because ripe fruits are more nutritious than immature fruit, humans have developed a preference for ripe fruit

Why do we enjoy ripe fruits(proximate)?

Because they taste good

Social neuroscience: challenges and opportunities in the study of complex behavior

Consequently, we believe that the validity of the concepts/constructs in social neuroscience and the generativity of the theories in the field will be advanced by embracing and building on the interdisciplinary nature of the field.

Mimicry serves many functions including:

Deception-to achieve aggressive or defensive goals, social glue-increases liking and rapport, and social perception-activating trait inferences and social stereotypes

The Neural Pathways, Development, and Functions of Empathy(Jean Decety)

Due to its evolutionary roots in parental care and group living, empathy is experienced more readily for in-group members, and thus may lead to favoritism and biases in decision-making.

Ultimate explanations of crying

Elicit care and defense from caregivers, communicate needs, thermoregulatory function by generating heat

Sympathy through affective perspective-taking and its relation to prosocial behavior in toddlers.

Examined whether children can, even in the absence of emotional cues, sympathize with a victim.We found that as early as 18 months of age, children show concern for an adult stranger who is in a hurtful situation but shows no emotion. What is striking about these results is not that such young children showed sympathy, which was to be expected given past work what is striking is that this is, to our knowledge, the first demonstration that such young children can sympathize with a sufferer even in the absence of overt emotional cues

What are the most common ways to regulate emotions?

Expressive suppressions of the conscious inhibition of emotion-expressive behavior

Why do human infants cry?(proximate explanation)

External reasons: physical separation from the caregiver, cold, lack of food. Internal" limbic system and endogenous opioids involved in the cessation of crying

Affective signaling and communication between conspecifics contributes to inclusive fitness because it:

Facilitates coordination and cooperation, increases defense against predators, helps synchronization of reproductive cycles, serves to bond individuals to one another, improves caregiving for offspring and other individuals within a social group

Batson(1997)

Feelings of empathic concern induced by perspective-taking can lead to valuing welfare of an out-group target

Saucier, Miller, and Doucet

Group differences in prosocial behavior. Are we more likely to help an in-group member than an out-group member? It depends on several factors: Can rationalize lack of helping?,Cost of helping, Distance from target, and level of emergency

Oxytocin-dependent consolation behavior in rodents

Here, we provide empirical evidence that a rodent species, the highly social and monogamous prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster), greatly increases partner-directed grooming toward familiar conspecifics (but not strangers) that have experienced an unobserved stressor, providing social buffering. Prairie voles also match the fear response, anxiety-related behaviors, and corticosterone increase of the stressed cagemate, suggesting an empathy mechanism. The presence of consolation behavior in prairie voles demonstrates that this behavior does not require advanced cognitive capacities, and the conserved neurobiology of consolation between prairie voles and humans suggests a deep homology of the underlying neural substrates.

Social cognition in members of conflict groups: behavioural and neural responses in Arabs, Israelis and South Americans to each other's misfortunes.(Bruneau, E. G., Dufour, N., & Saxe, R)

In contexts of cultural conflict, people delegitimize the other group's perspective and lose compassion for the other group's suffering. The participants expressed a specific lack of compassion for individuals in the conflict group, especially in situations eliciting secondary emotions, such as embarrassment, shame and humiliation. Conflict groups, in some sense, provide an even stronger test of the same idea: individuals from a conflict group are highly significant and emotionally salient for the participants, although they are also perceived as cold and hostile. Unlike strangers from distant or unfamiliar groups, such as the South Americans in the current study, and perhaps racial outgroup members in previous studies, members of conflict groups elicit strong and familiar emotional reactions.Nevertheless, the absence of any region whose neural response mirrors the pattern of behavioural judgements is puzzling. Participants report a significant difference in the compassion that they feel for ingroup versus conflict group targets, but no brain regions show a similarly suppressed response. We also did not observe clear evidence of Schadenfreude (pleasure at the outgroup's suffering), as indexed by activity in ventral striatum

The complexity of empathy during medical school training: Evidence for positive changes.( Smith, K. E., Norman, G. J., & Decety)

In reflection of findings in previous work, students' empathy assessed by the JSPE decreased over training. However, on the QCAE, aspects of students' empathy, specifically overall cognitive empathy and its subcomponent perspective taking, and the emotion contagion subcomponent of affective empathy improved, whereas the remaining subcomponents remained stable. During medical school, students also exhibited comparable growth in their understanding of others' emotions and increased sensitivity to others' pain.

Bystander Intervention

Individuals who believed themselves to be the sole witness to an emergency responded more quickly and more often than subjects who were aware of the presence of other witnesses(Gaertner and Dovidio)

What are some effects of suppression?

It consumes attentional resources as an event unfolds, it negatively impacts memory performance, and it reduces feelings of rapport during social interaction.

What does Oxytocin enable in animals?

It enables animals to overcome their natural avoidance of proximity and reduces withdrawal-related behaviors

What is reappraisal?

It involves reinterpreting a potentially emotional situation up front in a way that neutralizes its emotional impact

What does Language provide for emotion regulation?

It provides means of communicating needs, affective states, and enhances our ability to understand own and other's emotional lives

Empathic concern is synonymous with

Motivation to care

Silk, J. (2007). Empathy, sympathy, and prosocial preferences in primates. In R. I. M. Dunbar & L. Barrett (Eds). The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Non-human primates also act altruistically, but the extent and deployment of altruism in primate groups is much more limited than it is in human societies.Some forms of common behaviours have been interpreted as evidence of empathy and sympathy. These include wound cleaning (Boesch, 1992), reconciliation (OʼConnell, 1995), and consolation (OʼConnell, 1995; de Waal, 1996). Non-human primates often lick and groom others' wounds, and this may play a role in keeping the wounds clean and preventing infection.The fact that these three chimpanzees were as disturbed by the images of needles and dart-guns as they were by images of other chimpanzees being injected or darted suggests that the chimpanzees' responses represent an example of emotional contagion, rather than empathy or sympathy.Evidence of empathy, sympathy, moral sentiments, and prosocial preferences in chimpanzees or other primates would demonstrate that these traits have deep roots within the primate order. At the same time, the absence of these traits would indicate that the moral emotions and other-regarding sentiments that underlie prosocial behaviour may be an emergent property of human societies, linked to the capacity for culture, language, and a well-developed theory of mind.

Social class, contextualism, and empathic accuracy

Our central prediction was that participants with manipulated lower-class rank would discern the emotions of other people better than participants with manipulated upper-class rank. Initial analyses revealed that participants in the lowerclass-rank condition (M = 27.08) showed greater empathic accuracy than participants in the upper-class-rank condition (M = 25.23), F(1, 77) = 4.64, p < .05.

Fraser, O. N., & Bugnyar, T. (2010). Do ravens show consolation? Responses to distressed others.

Our findings suggest that in ravens, bystanders may console victims with whom they share a valuable relationship, thus alleviating the victims' post-conflict distress. Conversely victims may affiliate with bystanders after a conflict in order to reduce the likelihood of renewed aggression. These results stress the importance of relationship quality in determining the occurrence and function of post-conflict interactions, and show that ravens may be sensitive to the emotions of others(emotional contagion).In this study, patterns of post-conflict behavior suggested that bystanders consoled victims with whom they shared valuable relationships, indicating that the ravens may employ strategies similar to those used by chimpanzees to alleviate distress and mitigate the costs of aggressive conflict. Furthermore, our findings are consistent with the idea that ravens may show similar expressions of empathy for valuable partners.

Giving peace a chance: Oxytocin increases empathy to pain in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.(Shamay-Tsoory, S. G., Abu-Akel, A., Palgi, S., Sulieman, R., Fischer-Shofty, M., Levkwitz, Y., & Decety, J. )

Remarkably, there was a significant treatment by target interaction effect (F(2, 102) = 4.25, p = 0.018), indicating that OT affected empathy ratings differently depending on the group membership of the target. Our results show that the administration of OT to Jewish Israelis, in the context of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, significantly increased their empathic responses to pain experienced by Palestinian Arabs, an effect that was absent for both the in-group and the European neutral out-group.Interestingly, in our study, OT did not enhance the empathic responses toward the in-group members. This finding supports recent propositions suggesting that OT is not an automatic enhancer of empathy to all individuals in all contexts

Empathy, attitudes, and action: Can feeling for a member of a stigmatized group motivate people to help the group?(Batson, C. D., Chang, J., Orr, R., & Rowland, J. (2002))

Research reveals that inducing empathy for a member of a stigmatized group can improve attitudes toward the group as a whole.. All participants heard exactly the same interview with Jared Briggs, a convicted user and seller of heroin. Among participants told the interview was real, those induced to feel empathy for him reported more positive attitudes toward people addicted to hard drugs than did those not induced to feel empathy.More important, compared to individuals not induced to feel empathy, those induced to do so recommended allocating more Student Senate funds to an agency that would help drug addicts, thereby reducing funds available for other worthwhile community service project

________occurs at the back end, or after emotions have been triggered

Suppression

Galinski & Moskowitz

Taking the perspective of an out-group member leads to a decrease in the use of explicit and implicit stereotypes for that individual, and to more positive evaluations of that group as a whole

Batson, C. D., Klein, T. R., Highberger, L., & Shaw, L. (1995). Immorality from empathy induced altruism: when compassion and justice conflict.

The empathy-altruism hypothesis claims that empathy can be a source of immoral behavior.Empathy-induced altruism can, it seems, produce myopia in much the same way as egoistic self-interest. The ultimate goal of egoistic self-interest is to increase one's own welfare; the ulti- mate goal of altruism is to increase another's welfare. Each of these motives is focused on the welfare of specific persons, so each is potentially at odds with appeals to universal moral principles such as justice.

Sharing pain and relief: neural correlates of physicians during treatment of patients(Jensen, K. B., Petrovic, P., Kerr, C. E., Kirsch, I., Raicek, J., Cheetham)

The physician's ability to take the patients' perspective correlated with increased brain activations in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, a region that has been associated with processing of reward and subjective value

Roth-Hanania, R., Davidov, M., & Zahn-Waxler, C. (2011). Empathy development from 8 to 16 months: Early signs of concerned for others. Infant Behavior and Development

The study examined the responses of typically developing infants to the distress of another, prior to and following the transition to the second year. Infants' responses to maternal simulations of distress and to a peer distress videotape were observed from 8 to 16 months, using an accelerated longitudinal design (overall n = 37). Modest levels of affective and cognitive empathy for another in distress were already evident before the second year, and increased gradually (and not always significantly) across the transition to the second year. Prosocial behavior was rare in the first year and increased substantially during the second year. Self-distress reactions were rare overall. Individual differences in cognitive and affective empathy assessed in the first year, particularly at 10-months, predicted the levels of prosocial behavior observed in the second year. No gender differences were found.

Decety, J., & Cowell, J. M. (2014). The complex relation between morality and empathy.

There is no reason to see empathy and morality as either systematically opposed to one another, or inevitably complementary. It has been argued that moral progress involves expanding our concern from the family to humanity as a whole. Yet, it is difficult to feel the same concern toward someone who one has never met as one feels for one's own child or a lover. Nonetheless, over the course of history, humans have created social structures for upholding moral principles to all humanity, such as human rights and the International Criminal Court. Clearly, we value and can act prosocially toward strangers and extend concern beyond kin or kith. Understanding the complex relation between morality and the construct of 'empathy' may require abandoning the use of the catchall term 'empathy' in favor of more precise concepts (i.e., emotional sharing, empathic concern, and affective perspective-taking)

Functional relations of empathy and mentalizing: An fMRI study of cognitive empathy(Schnell, K., Bluschke, S., Konradt, B., & Walter, H)

This fMRI study was set up to explore how cognitive empathy, i.e. the cognitive inference on another person's affective state, can be characterized as a distinct brain function relating to pre-existing neurofunctional concepts about mentalizing and empathyts. After all, our results demonstrate a functional dissociation between cognitive empathy and cognitive visuospatial perspective taking. The simultaneous activation of the cortical mentalizing network and the amygdala indicates that cognitive empathy actually involves reference to own affective states in the observer.

Deconstructing empathy: Neuroanatomical dissociations between affect sharing and prosocial motivation using a patient lesion model(Deconstructing empathy: Neuroanatomical dissociations between affect sharing and prosocial motivation using a patient lesion model)

We found that the affect sharing component uniquely correlated with volume in right>left medial and lateral temporal lobe structures, including the amygdala and insula, that support emotion recognition, emotion generation, and emotional awareness

Yabar(2006)

We mimic an in-group member more than an out-group member. Experiment: In-group(Non-Christian) Out-group(Christian) Results showed an increased mimicry of in-group. Explicit and implicit liking predict the extent of mimicry

What is ontogeny?

When during development these traits emergy

what is emotion?

an adaptive orienting system that evolved to guide behavior

Empathy in humans remain connected to three core mechanisms

affective communication, social attachment, and parental care

Personal distress

an aversive affective state that has not to be congruent with the other's state and that leads to a self-oriented reaction

Two global arousal states of Newborns

attraction to pleasant stimulation and withdrawal from unpleasant simulation

obligatory interdependence

building blocks of human psychology-emotion, motivation, cognition have been shaped by the demands of social interdependence

What is causation?

conditions required for the behavior to be expressed

Behavior can be evaluated at 4 independent levels of explanation:

causation, ontogeny, phylogeny, and function

What does verbalization of feelings help reduce?

distress

Why is laughter contagious?

electrode contact lying in the left pre-SMA showed a characteristic response after the patient viewed happy faces, this same site also elicited laughter and merriment when electrically simulated

Verbal disclosure of a traumatic experience can improve what?

physical and psychological well-being

The influence of empathic concern on prosocial behavior in children

explored the influence of empathic distress on prosocial behavior in a resource allocation task with children.The current studies explored the relationship between empathy and prosocial behavior in children. It was hypothesized that experiencing empathy toward one's partner would both increase prosocial behavior, and decrease non-prosocial behavior. As hypothesized, both 5-6 year-olds, and 3-year-olds showed increased prosocial behavior, and 5-6 year-olds showed decreased non-prosocial behavior toward their partner, if they had first been primed to feel empathy for them.Overall, our experiments support the findings of Barraza and Zak (2009) that experiencing empathy for sadness leads to more prosocial behavior, and extends this finding to children across two distinct age groups. these experiments show that empathic concern for sadness does lead to prosocial resource allocation in young children both by promoting sharing and decreasing envy

Proximate explanations of crying

external triggers of crying and neural circuits in the brainstem and endogenous opioids involved in the cessation of crying

In-groups

groups you belong to

out-groups

groups you don't belong to

emotional contagion

having one person's emotions and related behaviors directly trigger similar emotions and behaviors in other people.

Ultimate cause

how and why did that behavior emerge? Fitness consequences

What is function?

how the behavior increases the reproductive success of inclusive fitness of the individual

consequences of group categorization

in-group favoritism, enhanced self-esteem, enhanced group boundaries, group norms, scripts, schemas, conformity, symbolic immortality, different empathy and helping behavior for in-group vs. out-group

Why is prosocial development important?

is both important in creating and sustaining personal relationships, and on a larger scale, a critical component in maintaining a functioning society.

Why do human infants cry?(ultimate explanation)

it elicits care and defense from mothers and caregivers...infants that do not cry when in need of assistance are less likely to survive

Sociality is beneficial because

it offers greater protection against predators, increases success in localization and access to resources, creates mating opportunities, and reduces the vulnerability of infanticide

The _______cortex is critical to the ability to attribute mental status to self and others and perspective-taking

medial prefontal cortex

Schino et al., 2004

mothers showed no changes in the rate of self-directed behaviours after their infants were involved in aggressive conflicts. Mothers were no more likely to approach their infants in the minutes that followed conflicts than they were at other times. Moreover, mothers' responses to their infants were not influenced by the risks their infants faced or the severity of the aggression that they received. The absence of empathy and sympathetic responses in a situation in which they would seem most likely to be manifest provides strong evidence that macaques may not have the capacity for empath

Theory of mind

our understanding of people as mental beings, each with his/her own mental states such as thoughts, wants, motives, and feelings

once part of a group, members tend to evaluate in-groups members____and out group members _____

positively, negatively

What does the insula do?

provides the foundation for the representation of both positive and negative subjective bodily feelings, which substantiates emotional awareness

what is prosocial behavior?

refers to actions that are intended to benefit another

Neural circuits involved in physical pain are also involved when we:

see another conspecific in pain, imagine the distress of another, grieving and extreme sadness, we are socially rejected by others

____emotions are integrally associated with brain structures that also promote theory of mind

self-conscious emotions

Empathic concern

sympathy refers to caring for the welfare of others, and a motivation to help

Empathy and pro-social behavior in rats

tested whether the presence of a trapped cagemate induces a pro-social motivational state in rats, leading them to open the restrainer door and liberate the cagemate;Our study demonstrates that rats behave pro-socially when they perceive a conspecific experiencing nonpainful psychological restraint stress (14, 15), acting to end that distress through deliberate action. In contrast to previous work (5, 9, 16, 17), the present study shows pro-social behavior accomplished by the deliberate action of a rat. Moreover, this behavior occurred in the absence of training or social reward, and even when in competition with highly palatable food.

What is emotion regulation?

the ability to respond to the ongoing demands of an experience with a range of emotions in a manner that is socially tolerable and sufficiently flexible

What does Emotion regulations moderate?

the association between empathy and prosocial behavior

Perspective taking

the capacity to take someone else's viewpoint into account when thinking

What is Convergent evolution?

the independent evolution of similar features in species of different lineages

Affect sharing

the natural ability to share the emotions and feelings(valence and intensity) of others

How Situational Context Impacts Empathic Responses and Brain Activation Patterns.(Cheng, Y., Chen, C., & Decety)

the study demonstrates how situational contexts significantly influence individuals' empathic processing, and that perceiving reward from patient care protects them from burnout.

Around 4 years of age, children realize that

thoughts in the mind may not be true

The mesolimbic dopamine system's core function is

to cherry-pick activities and make them feel rewarding. It also drives neurons to motivate us to feel those good sensations again

Motivation to care are evolved...

to promote parental care and attachment

Proximate causes

what mechanisms enable the organism to exhibit the behavior? How this function is achieved

What is phylogeny?

when during evolutionary history, these traits emerge