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Chapter 9”
Empathy and Interpersonal Sensitivity
A young girl, after watching a televised documentary account of child hunger and suffering in Bangladesh, pleads with her parents to “do something” to help them. A new child in
? The lead author is Jean Decety, Ph.D., the Irving B. Harris Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry, and co-director of the Brain Research Imaging Center at the University of Chicago Medical Center. He is the editor of the journal Social Neuroscience. His interests clude the investigation of the neurobiological mechanisms underpinning interpersonal sensitivity, particularly empathy and sympathy. His recent work focuses on developmental neuroscience with both typically developing children and adolescents as well as in children with deficits in empathic responding such as antisocial behavior problems. Decety has published more than 115 scientific papers, and recently edited the Social Neuroscience of Empathy (2009, MIT press), and Interpersonal Sensitivity: Entering Others’ World (2007, Psychology Press).
Empathy and sympathy play crucial roles in much of human social interaction and are necessary components for healthy co-existence. Sympathy is thought to have a key role in motivating prosocial behavior, guides our preferences and behavioral responses, and provides the affective and motivational base for moral development. Although the study of these abilities has traditionally been examined using behavioral and clinical methods, recent work in social neuroscience has begun to provide compelling and novel insights on the neural mechanisms involved in interpersonal sensitivity. These developments are explored in this essay.
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daycare is being ignored by the other children with the exception of one little boy who takes her hand and includes her in all his activities. These modest beginnings signal the important and ongoing role of empathy for surviving and flourishing in our social world. Empathy has been suggested to be essential to navigating the social world; it enhances our understanding of others, improves the effectiveness of our social communication, and fosters mutually satisfying social relationships. Conversely, lack of empathy or its maladaptive use causes social relationships to falter and fail.
Empathy refers to our natural capacity to quickly and automatically relate to the emotional states of another person. Rudimentary forms of empathy appear early in the life course, and with maturation, empathy can be experienced by simply reading about or imagining someone else’s emotion. Empathy comes so naturally that physicians must learn to dampen their empathic pain responses when inserting a needle into a patient (1). Just because empathy comes naturally does not mean, however, that it is instantiated in a discrete brain module that is automatically activated when one witnesses another’s distress or suffering. Rather, the experience of empathy is underpinned by the combined activity of several dissociable psychobiological systems. Further, empathy can be modulated by various contextual, dispositional, and interpersonal factors. The study of empathy, using sophisticated methods from psychology, neurology, neuroimaging, and neuropsychology, provide a unique opportunity to understand the invisible power of empathy in shaping our obligatorily gregarious social nature.
Defining empathy and its functions
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