College 2: The emphatic brain Flashcards
3 routes for understanding others:
- Kinesthetic empathy: simulating actions of others to one’s own.
- Cognitive empathy: mentalising other’s feelings.
- Affective empathy: emotional route of understanding others.
Action understanding
Perceiving one’s emotions based on bodily movements, vocalisation, facial expression etc. could also be moving in a similar fashian as the onther person.
Mentalising / Theory of mind / perspective taking.
Consciously thinking about another’s beliefs, desires and intentions. Cognitive thinking.
Empathy
The capacity to understand, to share and to respond accordingly to the affective state of others.
Self-other distinciton
The knowledge that what we feel is independent of what the other person is feeling, but the object can triggers the emotional state of the witness.
Precursors of empathy
Automatic and primitive reactions that could lead to empathy. Like mimicry and emotional contagion.
Consequences of empathy
The states following empathy that can determine our behaviour. Like compassion or emphatic distress.
Mimicry (precursor of empathy)
Automatically mirror someone’s emotional expression.
Emotional contagion (precursor of empathy)
The witness automatically resembles and synchronises with the object’s emotional state –> no self-others distinction.
The components of empathy
- The precursors of empathy
- The actual feeling of empathy (empahty proper)
- The consequences of empathy
Empathy proper
Feeling with someone. When resemblance of emotional state happens between the witness and the object, ant the witness is aware that these states are triggered by the object –> self-others distinction.
Compassion (consequence of empathy)
Witness conveys prosocial emotions to extend to the object for help / prosocial behaviour.
Emphatic distress (consequence of empathy)
Witness experiences aversive and self-oriented emotional response to the object’s suffering. Leads to withdrawal.
Mirror neurons
Fire when we see someone else perform goals-directed behaviour. Like when a monkeys seeing another monkey crack a nut, then the same neurons fire in their own brain as in the other monkeys brain. Mirror neurons are very important for experiencing empathy.
Domain-specific empathy
There are a lot of different domains of empathy, like disgust, touch, sadness, pain, social pain and embarrassment.
First-hand pain
Activates the complex brain network in the brain called the pain matrix.
The components of the pain matrix in the brain
- Affective-motivational component: processing the unpleasantness of pain.
- Sensory-discriminative component: processing the intensity, duration and localisation of pain.
Empathy for pain
When we see someone’s else in pain, this activates the pain matrix (Singer et al.)
Study about empathy for pain (Singer et al.)
16 couples. One of them received electrical shocks and both their brain activations were measures.
- Both the ACC and the anterior insula were activated in both partners.
- How strong the activation was, the higher the participants score on empathy.
Brain area’s for empathy for pain
- The ACC
- The anterior insula
Vicarious activation (in the brain)
Activation in the same brain area’s of your own brain when you see someone else experiences a certain emotion. Vicarious pain activation can be influenced by person-specific and contextual factors.
Other factors that influence empathy
- The relationship between the witness and the object.
- The characteristics of the witness.
- The contextual factors.
The relationship between the witness and the object
- People feel less empathy for someone who is playing unfair.
- Male participants experiences more schadefreude for unfair participants.
Characteristics of the witness
Previous experience of pain causes less vicarious pain activation in the brain. The characteristic ‘being an expert in pain’ influences the experience of vicarious pain.
