people in pain. Altogether, there is strong evidence to suggest that perceiving the pain of others triggers an automatic somatic sensory-motor mirroring mechanism between other and self, which activates almost the entire neural pain matrix including the periaqueductal gray, a major site in pain transmission and for processing of fear and anxiety, and the supplementary motor area that programs defensive movements in response to anticipated pain. Such a neural resonance mechanism provides a functional bridge between first-person and third-person information. It is grounded in the equivalence of self and other, which allows for analogical reasoning, and offers a possible, yet partial, route to understanding others.
Of course, human empathic abilities are more sophisticated than simply yoking perceptions of the self and other. In the eighteenth century, Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith proposed that through imagination, “we place ourselves in his situation... enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with” (8). By means of imagination we come to experience sensations which are generally similar to, although typically weaker than, those of the other person. This capacity to engage in role-taking has been theoretically linked to the development of empathy, moral reasoning, and more generally, prosocial behavior. Unlike the motor mimicry and emotional contagion aspect of empathy, perspective-taking develops later, possibly because it draws heavily on the maturation of executive functions (1.e., processes that serve to monitor and control thought and actions, including self-regulation, planning, cognitive flexibility, response inhibition,
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and resistance to interference), functions that are predominantly centered in the prefrontal cortex which continues to mature from birth to adolescence. Theoretically, imagining the other is distinct from imagining the self: the former may evoke empathic concern (defined as an other-oriented response congruent with the perceived distress of the person in need) while the latter induces both empathic concern and personal distress (1.e., a self-oriented aversive emotional response such as anxiety or discomfort). This distinction has been supported empirically. When individuals are asked to imagine how they would feel in reaction to emotion- laden familiar situations and to imagine how a known person would feel if she was experiencing the same situations, common neural circuits are activated both for the self and the other. However, relative to imagining the self, imagining the other results in specific activation of parts of the frontal cortex that are implicated in executive control—the use of attention and working memory and decisions—and an area of the brain at the interface of the temporal and parietal lobes of the brain that is a key component of a larger network of neural circuits involved in attention (sometimes called the temporoparietal junction).
Some researchers have hypothesized that the role of the frontal lobes and the temporoparietal junction is to hold separate perspectives or to resist interference against attention to one’s own perspective. In a recent functional brain imaging study (9), participants were shown pictures of people with their hands or feet in painful or non-painful situations with the instruction to imagine themselves or to imagine another individual experiencing these situations. During perception of painful situations,
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