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Neuroscience Meets Social Psychology:
An Integrative Approach to Human Empathy and Prosocial Behavior
Grit Hein1 and Tania Singer
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1 University of Zurich, Center for the Study of Social and Neural Systems
Corresponding author:
Grit Hein
University of Zurich
Center for the Study of Social and Neural Systems
Blümlisalpstrasse 10
CH-8006 Zurich / Switzerland
Tel: 0041 44 634 3741
E-Mail: [email protected]
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From the moment we are born, we interact with our social environment. Long-
term deprivation of social interaction causes uttermost despair and neural damage
(Innocenti, 2007), supporting the notion that human beings are innately social. The
question of how “peoples’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual,
imagined, or implied presence of others” is the focus of research in social psychology
(Allport, 1985). The long and fruitful tradition of social psychological research has
produced a variety of empirical approaches and models concerning prosocial motives,
emotions and behavior, as outlined in the other chapters of this book.
The field of neuroscience has only recently become interested in studying the
affective and social brain. A new interdisciplinary field, social neuroscience, has emerged
from a union of classical cognitive neuroscience and social psychology. Recent
neuroscientific research has addressed classical social psychological issues such as
peoples’ ability to understand other people’s minds: their beliefs, intentions, and feelings.
In the first part of this chapter we summarize the social neuroscience perspective on
“understanding others” and describe some of the key research findings. The second part
of the chapter discusses approaches and results related to the study of empathy and
prosocial behavior in social and developmental psychology. The last part of the chapter
provides a preliminary integration of the social neuroscience and social psychology
perspectives and discusses implication for future research.
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“Understanding Others” in Social Neuroscience
At first, social neuroscience focused mainly on the investigation of basic social
abilities (for a review and overviews, see Adolphs, 1999, 2003; Blakemore, Winston, &
Frith, 2004; Ochsner & Lieberman, 2001). Several functional neuroimaging studies, for
example, have investigated the neural correlates of attending, recognizing, and
remembering socially relevant stimuli such as the facial expressions of fear, attractive
faces, indicators of trustworthiness, racial identity, and faces of fair and unfair players in
a game (Hart et al., 2000; Morris et al., 1996; O’Doherty et al., 2003; Singer et al., 2004;
Winston et al., 2002).
More recently, social neuroscientists have begun to clarify the neural mechanisms
underlying our ability to understand other people’s beliefs and thoughts, an ability known
as having a “theory of mind” (e.g., Premack & Woodruff, 1978), “mentalizing” (Frith &
Frith, 2003), “mindreading” (Baron-Cohen, 1995), or “cognitive perspective taking”; and
our ability to share other people’s feelings, referred to as “empathy” (for a similar
distinction between cognitive and affective aspects of reactions to other people, see Blair,
2005; de Vignemont & Singer, 2006; Decety & Lamm, 2007; Gallese, 2003; Keysers &
Gazzola, 2007; Preston & de Waal, 2002; Singer, 2006). Even though mentalizing and
empathizing are often used in concert when we try to understand other people’s minds,
preliminary evidence from studies of patients with marked social deficits, such as autism
or psychopathy, suggest that mentalizing and empathizing are two distinct abilities that
rely on different neural circuitries (see also Figure 1; Blair, 2005; Singer, 2006). For
example, patients with autistic spectrum disorders often have deficits in cognitive
perspective taking, while psychopaths are very good at understanding other people’s
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intentions and consequently at manipulating other people’s behavior. In contrast,
psychopaths lack empathy, which may be part of the reason for their antisocial behavior.
This dissociation points to an important difference between our ability to
mentalize and our ability to empathize. Whereas both abilities play an important role in
drawing inferences about other people’s cognitive and emotional states, it has been
suggested that empathy is not just a matter of cognition, but also has motivational,
emotional, and social aspects (for a similar argument, see de Vignemont & Singer, 2006).
De Vignemont and Singer (2006) describe empathy as follows: We “empathize” with
others when we have (a) an affective state (b) that is isomorphic to another person’s
affective state and (c) was elicited by observing or imagining another person’s affective
state, and (d) when we know that the other person’s affective state is the source of our
own affective state.
The first statement is important because it differentiates empathy from theory of
mind, cognitive perspective taking, and mentalizing. The term “mentalizing” connotes a
person’s ability to cognitively represent the mental states of others, including their
affective states, without necessarily becoming emotionally involved. The term
“empathizing” connotes the capacity to share other people’s feelings. Accordingly, when
one empathizes with another person who is in pain, one feels the other person’s pain in
one’s own body. In contrast, when one understands someone else’s thoughts, one does
not feel the thought of the other in one’s own body. There are no qualia attached to the
representation of the other person’s thoughts. This difference and its significance become
clearer when we consider psychopaths: They do not have an impaired ability to
understand other people’s wishes, beliefs, intentions, and desires, but they seem to lack
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the embodied feeling of empathy, which allows non-psychopaths to anticipate and
appreciate others’ suffering, thereby often preventing them from harming others. Thus,
although psychopaths possess the ability to mentalize, they are not able to empathize (for
a similar argument, see Blair, 2005).
Part b of de Vignemont and Singer’s (2006) description of empathy is important
in distinguishing “empathy” from “sympathy” or “compassion” (see Eisenberg & Miller,
1987, for a similar distinction). In all three cases, we feel vicariously for the other person.
But when we “empathize,” we share the other person’s feelings; when we “sympathize”
or show “compassion” we do not necessarily share the same feeling. For example, to use
first-person language for a moment, when I empathize with a person who is sad, I feel sad
myself. When I sympathize with or feel compassion for a sad person, I feel pity, love, or
concern for the person but am not sad myself. Also, when I notice that someone is jealous
or envious of me, I can sympathize with or show compassion toward that person, but I am
not jealous or envious myself. Further, empathy is not necessarily linked to prosocial
motivation – that is, a wish to maximize the other person’s happiness or alleviate the
other person’s distress, whereas there is such a link from sympathy or compassion to
prosocial motivation and actions or action tendences. Empathy can be misused, for
example, by a torturer who empathizes to find his victim’s weakest point, but he is far
from showing compassion for the suffering person.
Finally, de Vignemont and Singer’s (2006) conception of empathy distinguishes
between “empathy” and what might be called emotional contagion. The latter refers to a
reaction in which one shares an emotion with another person without realizing that the
other person’s emotion was the trigger. For example, babies start crying when they hear
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other babies crying, long before they develop a sense of a self separate from others.
Those reactions might be a precursor of the development of a capacity for empathy (see
Sagi & Hoffman, 1976), but they are not considered empathic responses per se, because
the babies are not aware that they are vicariously feeling another person’s distress.
This discussion emphasizes the difference between perspective taking, the cooler,
more cognitive apprehension of others’ emotions, and empathy, which is a warmer, more
embodied sharing of emotions perceived in another person. From the neuroscientific
perspective, this distinction is expected to be reflected in differences in the neural
systems involved in cognitive perspective taking and empathic sharing of emotions.
“Theory of Mind” Studies
Neuroimaging studies of cognitive perspective taking are often referred to as
“theory of mind” experiments. In most cases, they are conducted with healthy adults, who
are asked to understand the intentions, beliefs, and desires of a protagonist in a story or a
cartoon (for a review, see Gallagher & Frith, 2003). Theory of mind studies have
consistently revealed a neural network comprising the posterior superior temporal sulcus
(STS), extending into the temporoparietal junctions (TPJ), the medial prefrontal cortex
(mPFC), and sometimes the temporal poles (TP). A schematic representation of the
mentalizing brain network is shown in Figure 1 in green.
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Insert Figure 1 about here
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Interestingly, the mPFC is involved not only when people mentalize other
people’s thoughts, intentions, and beliefs, but also when people reflect on their own states
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(Mitchell, Banaji, & Macrae, 2005a). Jason Mitchell (Mitchell et al., 2002, 2005b, 2006)
recently conducted a series of experiments on mentalizing, which revealed functional
differences between judging the mental states of similar and dissimilar others. A more
ventral part of the mPFC was recruited when participants made self-judgments or
judgments about people whom they perceived as being similar to themselves with respect
to appearance or political attitudes. By contrast, a more dorsal part of the mPFC showed
enhanced activation – close to the activation found in the mentalizing studies cited above
– when participants judged the mental states of people perceived as being dissimilar to
themselves. This suggests that we use two different strategies when inferring other
people’s mental states: With one strategy, we simulate the other person’s states on the
basis of knowledge we have about ourselves; with the other strategy, we infer the mental
states of the other on the basis of more abstract knowledge about the world.
Studies of Empathy
While theory of mind research focuses on complex inferences about abstract
mental states such as other people’s beliefs, another line of neuroscientific research has
focused on our ability to understand other people’s goals and intentions by neuronally
simulating them. This line of research is based on the ground-breaking discovery of
“mirror neurons” in monkey premotor cortex, which fired both when a monkey
performed hand movements itself and when it merely observed another monkey or a
human performing the same hand movements (Ferrari et al., 2003; Gallese et al., 1996;
Rizzolatti et al., 1996). Later on, a similar common coding of the perception and
generation of motor actions was demonstrated in the human brain, using imaging
techniques such as PET or fMRI (for a review, see Grezes & Decety, 2001). In line with
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the monkey studies, the human studies revealed that the same circuitry was recruited
when participants merely observed another person performing an action and when they
performed the same action themselves.
The idea that perception-action links in the brain enable us to understand others, a
claim that was originally established in the motor domain, has recently been expanded to
feelings and sensations (de Vignemont & Singer, 2006; Decety & Jackson, 2004; Decety
& Lamm, 2006; Gallese, 2003; Preston & de Waal, 2002). Indeed, fMRI studies in
humans have provided evidence that such shared neural networks enable us to “share”
pain, touch, or disgust with another person merely by perceiving or imagining the other
person in a relevant situation, in the absence of any stimulation of our own body. For
example, a study by Wicker et al. (2003) showed that viewing pictures of disgusted faces
and smelling disgusting odors produced corresponding neural responses in viewers. Jabbi
et al. (2007) had participants watch video clips showing people sampling pleasant and
unpleasant tastes, and then experience the different tastes themselves. Both studies
(Wicker et al., 2003; Jabbi et al., 2007) found neural activation in anterior insula cortex
(see Figure 1), a brain region involved in processing disgust and taste, among other
sensations, when people passively watched disgust in another person and when they were
disgusted themselves.
The majority of studies on empathic brain responses have been conducted in the
domain of pain (Avenanti et al., 2005, 2006; Botvinick et al., 2005; Bufalari et al., 2007;
Cheng et al., 2007; Gu & Han, 2007; Moriguchi et al., 2007; Jackson et al., 2005, 2006;
Lamm, Batson, & Decety, 2007; Morrison et al., 2004, 2007; Morrison & Downing,
2007; Singer et al., 2004, 2006; Saarela et al., 2007). For example, in an early study,
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Singer and colleagues (2004) recruited couples and measured empathy “in vivo” by
assessing brain activity in the female partner while painful stimulation was applied either
to her own or to her partner’s right hand via electrodes attached to the back of the hand.
The male partner was seated next to the MRI scanner and a mirror system allowed the
female partner to see her own as well as her partner’s hand lying on a tilted board in front
of her. Before the experiment started, the couples were allowed to engage in social
interaction to increase the feeling of being in a “real-life situation.” Differently colored
flashes of light on a screen behind the board pointed to either the male or the female
partner’s hand, indicating which of them would receive painful and which would receive
non-painful stimulation.
This procedure permitted the measurement of pain-related brain activation when
pain was applied to the scanned participant (felt pain) or to her partner (empathy for
pain). The results indicated that parts of the so-called “pain matrix” – bilateral anterior
insula (AI), rostral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), brainstem, and cerebellum – were
activated when participants experienced pain themselves as well as when they saw a
signal indicating that a loved one had experienced pain. These areas are involved in the
processing of the affective component of pain – that is, the degree to which the
subjectively felt pain is unpleasant. Thus, both the experience of one’s own pain and the
knowledge that a beloved partner is experiencing pain activate the same affective pain
circuits, suggesting that if a beloved partner suffers pain, our brains also cause us to
suffer from this pain.
Activation in this network was also observed when participants saw an unknown
but likeable person suffering pain (Singer et al., 2006) or watched videos showing body
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parts in potentially painful situations (Jackson et al., 2005, 2006), painful facial
expressions (Lamm et al., 2007), or hands being pricked by needles (Morrison et al.,
2004; for a review, see de Vignemont & Singer, 2006).
Analyses of empathic brain responses obtained while participants were observing
other people suffering – be it their loved ones or people the participants liked (Singer et
al., 2004, 2006) – have revealed individual differences in activity in empathy-related
pain-sensitive areas (ACC and AI). According to the results of Singer and associates,
these differences co-vary with scores on the Empathic Concern Scale of the Interpersonal
Reactivity Index (IRI; Davis, 1980) and the Balanced Emotional Empathy Scale (BEES;
Mehrabian & Epstein, 1972). The higher participants scored on these questionnaires, the
higher their activation in ACC and anterior insula. Interestingly, Jabbi et al. (2007)
observed similar correlations between IRI subscales and empathic brain responses in the
anterior insula among participants who had observed others tasting pleasant or unpleasant
drinks associated with facial expressions of joy or disgust.
Empathic brain responses are positively correlated not only with trait measures of
empathy, but also with unpleasantness ratings given online after each trial of an empathy-
inducing task (Jackson et al., 2005; Lamm et al., 2007; Saarela et al., 2007). Future
research will have to clarify how these individual differences in empathic brain responses
come about and whether they are able to explain individual differences in prosocial
behavior, two lines of research which have not yet been sufficiently addressed.
“Understanding Others” in Social Psychology
In social psychology, the term most commonly used in the context of
understanding others’ emotional states is empathy. Depending on the focus of research,
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different definitions of empathy have been offered. Hoffman (1981, p. 44) proposed a
relatively broad definition: “an affective response appropriate to someone else’s situation
rather than one’s own.” He considered empathy to be the result of a developmental
sequence, beginning with babies crying when they hear another baby’s cry and arriving,
after considerable development, at a clear sense of others as distinct from the self.
Perceived distress in the other can elicit “empathic distress” or “sympathetic distress.”
The latter is the basis for altruistic motivation, which consists mainly of the urge to
relieve one’s own distress.
Eisenberg and her associates (see review in Eisenberg, Chapter 7, this volume)
distinguish between empathy and sympathy. Empathy is defined as “an affective state
that stems from the apprehension of another’s emotional state or condition, and that is
congruent with it” (Eisenberg & Miller, 1987, p. 91). Sympathy is defined as “an
emotional response stemming from another’s emotional state or condition that is not
identical to the other’s emotion, but consists of feelings of sorrow or concern for
another’s welfare” (p. 92). Empathy in its pure form is not other-oriented. With further
cognitive processing it can turn into sympathy, personal distress, or a combination of
both (Eisenberg, 2000). Prosocial behavior is negatively correlated with personal distress,
and positively associated with sympathy (Eisenberg & Miller, 1987). Sympathy can
derive from empathy, but also from cognitive perspective taking. In children, empathic
responding is observed in the second year of life (Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow, & King,
1979; Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow, Wagner, & Chapman, 1992). It correlates with
parents’ expressivity, mediated by the level of the child’s effortful control (Valiente et al.,
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2004), and predicts measurable prosocial dispositions, which are stable across five years
in early adulthood (Eisenberg et al., 2002).
The term “empathic concern,” introduced by Batson (see review in Chapter 1, this
volume) is similar to Eisenberg’s definition of sympathy. Empathic concern is defined as
an other-oriented response congruent with the perceived distress experienced by another
person (e.g., Batson, Turk, Shaw, & Klein, 1995). It is elicited by adopting the other’s
perspective and requires valuing the other’s welfare (Batson, Eklund, Chermok, Hoyt, &
Ortiz, 2007). In many cases, similarity between the individual and the person in need
increases empathic concern (Batson, Duncan, Ackerman, Buckley, & Birch, 1981) but is
neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition (Batson, Lishner, Cook, & Sawyer, 2005).
Valuing the welfare of the other is also affected by similarity, and remains stable even
after situational empathy has declined (Batson et al., 1995).
In line with the results of Eisenberg and associates on children and young adults
(e.g., Eisenberg, & Miller, 1987), the findings of Batson and colleagues support the
assumption that feeling empathy for a person in need leads to increased helping, one kind
of prosocial behavior. Experiments have shown that most people are willing to receive
uncomfortable electrical shocks themselves in order to help another person in need, even
if they are offered an “easy escape” that would not require helping. Only people who
report a high level of personal distress instead of empathy prefer to escape rather than
help (Batson, 1991).
What is the difference between someone who is empathic and helps, and someone
who is distressed and opts to escape? One approach to answering this question is to
identify personality traits that make up a “prosocial personality” (Penner, Fritzsche,
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Craiger, & Freifeld, 1995; Penner & Orom, Chapter 3, this volume). Penner and
associates have identified two major components of a prosocial personality. The first
concerns prosocial thoughts and feelings, such as a sense of responsibility and a tendency
to experience cognitive and affective empathy. A second factor concerns being helpful –
that is, perceiving oneself as someone who is willing and able to help. Both factors are
significantly associated with actual prosocial behavior, such as helping co-workers or
volunteering in the community (e.g., Penner, 2002; Penner, Dovidio, Piliavin, &
Schroeder, 2005).
Another framework for investigating individual differences in empathy and
prosocial behavior is attachment theory, proposed originally by Bowlby (1982) and
elaborated and experimentally tested by Mikulincer and Shaver (2007; also Chapters 4
and 13 in the present volume). According to this theory, human beings are innately
equipped with attachment and caregiving behavioral systems. The attachment system is
especially apparent during the first years of life, but has also proven to influence social
interactions across the life span (Fraley & Shaver, 2000; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007).
Individual differences in attachment style can be measured along two orthogonal
dimensions, attachment-related anxiety and avoidance (Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998).
Relatively low scores on these dimensions indicate attachment security, which has been
associated with empathy in young children (2 to 3 years old; Kerstenbaum, Farber, &
Sroufe, 1989; van der Mark, van IJzendoorn, & Bakermans-Kranenburg, 2002) and in
adults (Mikulincer et al., 2001). Increasing security by experimental techniques such as
implicit and explicit priming has been shown to affect compassion and altruistic behavior
(Mikulincer, Shaver, Gillath, & Nitzberg, 2005), whereas attachment insecurity can
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interfere with the natural tendency to help others in need (Gillath, Shaver, & Mikulincer,
2005; Feeney & Collins, 2001; also Collins, Chapter 18, this volume).
Besides the influences of individual differences, the relation between empathy and actual
prosocial behavior is influenced by social factors, such as whether the person in need is
seen as a member of one’s own or a different group (Dovidio, Gaertner, Johnson,
Ashburn-Nardo, & Spicer, Chapter 20, this volume). There is a large body of evidence
indicating strong favoritism toward members of one’s group (e.g., Hewstone, Rubin, &
Willis, 2002; Mullen, Brown, & Smith, 1992). Empathy is a better predictor of helping an
ingroup member, probably because empathic concern is facilitated by familiarity and
attachment, whereas prosocial behavior toward outgroup members is based on factors
such as attraction (Sturmer, Snyder, & Omoto, 2005). Taking the perspective of an
outgroup member (Finlay, & Stephan, 2000), however, or focusing on the person’s
feelings (Batson et al., 1997; Vescio, Sechrist, & Paolucci, 2003) reduces intergroup
prejudice and bias (Dovidio et al., 2004).
“Understanding Others” in Neuroscience and Social Psychology:
An Integrative Perspective
In both disciplines, empathy is seen as central for our ability to understand
another person’s emotional states, but does “empathy” have the same meaning in social
neuroscience and in social and developmental psychology? In some social psychological
definitions, empathy is viewed as an affective response that is congruent with (Eisenberg
& Miller, 1987) or appropriate for (Hoffman, 1981) another’s emotion. Other definitions
emphasize that empathy is related to adopting the other’s perspective (e.g., Batson et al.,
1995). While affective empathic responses and perspective taking are often linked, the
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reviewed neuroscientific studies suggest a clear distinction between putting oneself into
another’s shoes (or mind: cognitive perspective taking) and sharing the other’s affective
state in an embodied manner (empathy). Accordingly, part of the conception of empathy
in social neuroscience is based on its demarcation from cognitive perspective taking
(Blair, 2005; de Vignemont & Singer, 2006; Decety & Lamm, 2007; Gallese, 2003;
Keysers & Gazzola, 2007; Singer, 2006). This distinction is in line with early social
psychological work, which also proposed a distinction between perspective taking and
empathic concern (e.g., Coke, Batson, & Mc Davis, 1978).
Although so far empathy research in the two disciplines has developed relatively
independently, there is consistency between measures of empathy in social psychology
and neuroscience. This is reflected by the covariation of individual scores on empathy
questionnaires such as the IRI (Davis, 1980) and the BEES (Mehrabian & Epstein, 1972)
with empathy-related activation of ACC and anterior insula (Singer et al., 2004, 2006).
Social neuroscience has taken only preliminary steps in investigating individual
differences in empathy-related brain activity. But it is already clear that the neural
empathy response is related to a participant’s affective ties to the other person (Singer et
al., 2004, 2006), the participant’s appraisal of whether the other person’s suffering is
justified (Lamm et al., 2007), prior experience with the situation (Cheng et al., 2007), and
the intensity of the inflicted pain (e.g., seeing a needle pricking vs. penetrating a muscle,
Avenanti et al., 2006).
It would now be worthwhile to investigate whether differences in prosocial
personality traits (Penner, 2002) or attachment styles (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007)
predict differences in activation of the brain network associated in social neuroscience
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studies of empathy. There is already evidence that attachment-style differences in ability
to suppress emotionally painful thoughts modulate brain activity (Gillath, Bunge, Shaver,
Wendelken, & Mikulincer, 2005).
Another focus for future research would be possible links between empathic brain
responses, sympathy, and prosocial behavior. Based on current neuroscientific evidence it
is difficult to decide whether empathic brain responses reflect feeling like the other
person, in the sense of simulation the other’s feelings, or feeling for the other, in the
sense of sympathy. One way to disentangle the two would be to correlate empathic brain
responses with nuanced situational self-reports, as already done in social psychology (for
example, in distinguishing between empathy and personal distress). Moreover, social and
developmental psychologists have designed clever experimental paradigms to investigate
the links between empathy or sympathy and prosocial behavior, and some of these could
be adapted for neuroscience experiments.
Working from the other side of the disciplinary divide, social and developmental
psychologists might be able to avoid some difficulties in previous empathy research by
using neuroimaging methods. For example, in many behavioral empathy studies,
participants are repeatedly asked to report their feelings. This can be problematic,
because it creates strong demand characteristics (Eisenberg, & Lennon, 1983) and may
induce social desirability biases. Neuroimaging methods should be beneficial in such
cases, because empathy and related phenomena can be investigated without such explicit
instructions and self-observations (e.g., Singer et al., 2004, 2006). Moreover,
neuroimaging methods can help to disentangle separate psychological processes, which
may have similar behavioral correlates, yet be importantly distinct. For example,
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emotionally empathizing with or cognitively taking the perspective of another person can
lead to the same behavioral outcome, but if they have different neural correlates they can
be more carefully distinguised. Another interesting contribution of neuroscience methods
is the quantification of changes in empathic response over the life span and as a function
of empathy training or other interventions. For example, assessing the neural plasticity in
empathic responses in children of different ages would add to our understanding of
developmental aspects of empathy, complementing the already existing behavioral data.
Last but not least, our brains do not exist in isolation and their functioning should
be modulated by the social factors and culture, on the “meso-level” of groups and the
“macro-level” of society (Penner et al., 2005). According to research in social
psychology, ingroup and intergroup processes have strong effects on empathy and
prosocial behavior (Dovidio et al., 2004), but such effects have not yet been explored
with neuroscientific methods. It would be interesting to investigate whether ingroup and
intergroup effects modulate empathy-related brain activity, opening yet another broad
avenue for future social neuroscience research.
-------------------------------
Insert Figure 2 about here
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Social neuroscience and social and developmental psychology have contributed
different pieces to the large, complex puzzle of empathy and prosocial behavior, as
visualized in Figure 2. So far, social neuroscience has elucidated how emotional
contagion and empathy are implemented in the human brain, but it has not yet explored
how empathy, sympathy, and empathic concern affect prosocial behavior. Empathy
research in social and developmental psychology starts there, providing knowledge and
measures related to connections between mental processes, individual differences, and
prosocial behavior. It will prove useful to have a more extensive dialogue between the
different kinds of researchers.
Conclusion
In this chapter, we have reviewed findings related to empathy and prosocial
behavior from social neuroscience and social and developmental psychology. In the
young field of social neuroscience, empathy research has focused on identifying brain
regions and mechanisms involved in empathy and perspective taking, which leaves a
variety of open questions concerning the sources of individual differences in empathic
brain responses, the development of the empathic brain, and the links between empathic
brain responses and actual helping behavior. Social and developmental psychologists
have acquired expertise in these domains. We are convinced that integrating and linking
the social neuroscience and the social and developmental psychology of empathy and
prosocial behavior will be fruitful for both fields and will improve our understanding of a
very important domain of human experience and behavior..
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Note
We thank Daniel Batson for valuable comments on the manuscript. This work was
supported by the University of Zürich and the Society in Science: The Branco Weiss
Fellowship (G.H.). Correspondence should be addressed to [email protected].
30
Figure Captions
Figure 1. Brain networks involved in understanding others. Schematic representation of
the brain areas typically involved in theory of mind (green) and empathy (orange) tasks.
MFC = medial prefrontal cortex; ACC = anterior cingulate cortex; AI = anterior insula;
SII = secondary somatosensory cortex; TP = temporal poles; STS = superior temporal
sulcus; TPJ = temporo-parietal junction.
Figure 2. Summary of complementary foci of research on empathy and prosocial
behavior in social neuroscience and social and developmental psychology.
