Human Empathy and Cognitive Perspective Taking from the Lens of Social Neuroscience
Tania Singer
University of Zurich
With the emergence of social neuroscience, researchers have started to investigate the underpinnings of our ability to share and understand feelings of others. After a definition of the concepts ‘cognitive perspective taking’, ‘emotion contagion’, ‘empathy’ and ‘compassion’ I will shortly revise the main results of neuroscientific studies on our ability to understand other peoples intentions and believes. I will then show several fMRI studies investigating empathic brain responses elicited by the observation of others in pain and show how these empathic brain responses are modulated by several contextual and stimulus intrinsic factors. I will then show results of studies exploring the relationship between interoceptive awareness, empathy and pathologies such as Alexithymia and Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). These results suggest that impaired interoceptive awareness –a symptom observed in Alexithymia- is associated with impaired empathy but not cognitive perspective taking, the latter being frequently observed in patients with ASD. Finally, I will conclude the talk with results of three studies, one investigating the effects of oxytocin on empathy and prosocial behavior, the second one on the developmental underpinnings of our capacity for empathy and emotion control and the third one on expertise effects observed in long-term meditation practitioners while they are engaging in different forms of compassion-enhancing meditation techniques while being scanned.