A Social-Neuroscience Perspective on Empathy

ABSTRACT—In recent years, abundant evidence from be-havioral and cognitive studies and functional-imaging experiments has indicated that individuals come to un-derstand the emotional and affective states expressed by others with the help of the neural architecture that pro-duces such states in themselves. Such a mechanism gives rise to shared representations, which constitutes one im-portant aspect of empathy, although not the sole one. We suggest that other components, including people’s ability to monitor and regulate cognitive and emotional processes to prevent confusion between self and other, are equally necessary parts of a functional model of empathy. We dis-cuss data from recent functional-imaging studies in sup-port of such amodel and highlight the role of specific brain regions, notably the insula, the anterior cingulate cortex