College 2: The emphatic brain

Question 1

3 routes for understanding others:

Answer 1

1. Kinesthetic empathy: simulating actions of others to one’s own.
2. Cognitive empathy: mentalising other’s feelings.
3. Affective empathy: emotional route of understanding others.

Question 2

Action understanding

Answer 2

Perceiving one’s emotions based on bodily movements, vocalisation, facial expression etc. could also be moving in a similar fashian as the onther person.

Question 3

Mentalising / Theory of mind / perspective taking.

Answer 3

Consciously thinking about another’s beliefs, desires and intentions. Cognitive thinking.

Question 4

Empathy

Answer 4

The capacity to understand, to share and to respond accordingly to the affective state of others.

Question 5

Self-other distinciton

Answer 5

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.

Question 6

Precursors of empathy

Answer 6

Automatic and primitive reactions that could lead to empathy. Like mimicry and emotional contagion.

Question 7

Consequences of empathy

Answer 7

The states following empathy that can determine our behaviour. Like compassion or emphatic distress.

Question 8

Mimicry (precursor of empathy)

Answer 8

Automatically mirror someone’s emotional expression.

Question 9

Emotional contagion (precursor of empathy)

Answer 9

The witness automatically resembles and synchronises with the object’s emotional state –> no self-others distinction.

Question 10

The components of empathy

Answer 10

1. The precursors of empathy
2. The actual feeling of empathy (empahty proper)
3. The consequences of empathy

Question 11

Empathy proper

Answer 11

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.

Question 12

Compassion (consequence of empathy)

Answer 12

Witness conveys prosocial emotions to extend to the object for help / prosocial behaviour.

Question 13

Emphatic distress (consequence of empathy)

Answer 13

Witness experiences aversive and self-oriented emotional response to the object’s suffering. Leads to withdrawal.

Question 14

Mirror neurons

Answer 14

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.

Question 15

Domain-specific empathy

Answer 15

There are a lot of different domains of empathy, like disgust, touch, sadness, pain, social pain and embarrassment.

Question 16

First-hand pain

Answer 16

Activates the complex brain network in the brain called the pain matrix.

Question 17

The components of the pain matrix in the brain

Answer 17

• Affective-motivational component: processing the unpleasantness of pain.
• Sensory-discriminative component: processing the intensity, duration and localisation of pain.

Question 18

Empathy for pain

Answer 18

When we see someone’s else in pain, this activates the pain matrix (Singer et al.)

Question 19

Study about empathy for pain (Singer et al.)

Answer 19

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.

Question 20

Brain area’s for empathy for pain

Answer 20

• The ACC
• The anterior insula

Question 21

Vicarious activation (in the brain)

Answer 21

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.

Question 22

Other factors that influence empathy

Answer 22

1. The relationship between the witness and the object.
2. The characteristics of the witness.
3. The contextual factors.

Question 23

The relationship between the witness and the object

Answer 23

• People feel less empathy for someone who is playing unfair.
• Male participants experiences more schadefreude for unfair participants.

Question 24

Characteristics of the witness

Answer 24

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.

Question 25

The influence of the situational context of empathy

Answer 25

• People experience more empathy / vicarious activation for someone if they were not responsible for their own pain.
• People experienced less empathy / vicarious activation if they were responsible for their own pain.

Question 26

Empathy and prosocial behaviour

Answer 26

The somatosensory cortex plays an important role in empathy and prosocial behaviour. When the cortex is inhibited, this leads to less prosocial behaviour because the participants can no longer accurately asses the pain of someone else.