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Empathy and Compassion (Empirical claims (What are the limitations of…

- - - - Experience sharing
        
        emotional contagion
        
        affective empathy
        
        shared self-other representations
      - Prosocial concern
        
        empathic motivation
        
        sympathy
        
        empathic concern
      - Mentalizing
        
        cognitive empathy
        
        perspective taking
        
        theory of mind
    - - emotional contagion
        
        is empathy that spreads through crowds;
        it is feeling anxious when everyone else
        is feeling anxious, or joy when everyone
        is feeling joyful
      - compassion
        
        is positive affect from the well-being
        of others
      - cognitive empathy
        
        is theory of mind at work: it is understanding
        what someone is feeling without experiencing it
        for oneself
      - emotional empathy
        
        is when one mirrors the inferred feelings of others
  - - - "Notably, models that focus on single empathic subprocesses whileremaining agnostic about the role of others or excluding themaltogether run the risk of reflecting historical quirks in the field’schoice of methods instead of deeper insights about the structure ofempathy. This is because until a few years ago neuroscientific studiesof empathy almost always used highly simplified cues and tasksdesigned to isolate one type of empathic subprocess and its associatedneural systems."
        (Zaki & Ochsner, 2012)
        
        In other words, empathic responses are
        established in isolated, bite-sized pieces
        in the literature, but how we behave when
        those pieces are put together is less clear.
    - - That is, you can't combine activations in
        Brain Regions X, Y, Z to produce a
        complex behavior. The brain is difficult
        to reduce to components.
    - - E.g. stimuli used in studies could be
        sensorimotor or social cues. Is the resulting
        difference in neural activation due to different
        kinds of empathy at play or due to the difference
        in stimuli used?
    - - We have not done the legwork to
        connect psychology to neuroscience.
        Why does the activation of Brain Region X
        show Psychological Construct Y?
  - - - Factor analysis of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI)
        and of the Empathy Index (EI) suggests at least three clusters
        of behaviour regarding empathic questions. (Jordan et al, 2016)
        
        Some examples of the questions
        which appear in both scales
        
        In emergency situations, I feel apprehensive and ill-at-ease. (Personal Distress)
        
        Before criticizing somebody, I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place. (Perspective Taking)
        
        If I see a video of a baby smiling, I find myself smiling. (Behavioral Contagion)
        
        When I see someone being treated unfairly, I sometimes don’t feel very much pity for them. (Empathic Concern)
        
        When I watch a good movie, I can very easily put myself in the place of a leading character. (Fantasy)
        
        If I see someone fidgeting, I’ll start feeling anxious too. (Empathy)
        
        I sometimes find it difficult to see things from the “other guy’s” point of view. (Perspective Taking)
        
        x-axis: Contagion factor loading (0.0 to 1.0)
        y-axis: Other-regarding factor loading (0.0 to 1.0)
        
        Cluster # 1 (0, 0.7)
        Perspective Taking, Concern
        
        Cluster # 3 (0, 0.7)
        Empathy, Behavioural Contagion, Personal Distress
        
        Cluster # 2 (0.4, 0.4)
        Fantasy
      - Brain regions activated by empathic tasks (Zaki & Ochsner, 2012)
        
        first-person experience (self condition)
        
        medial prefrontal cortex
        
        temporal ole
        
        precuneus
        
        tempoparietal junction
        
        neural resonance (both self and other conditions)
        
        posterior superior temporal sulcus
        
        premotor cortex
        
        anterior cingulate cortex
        
        inferior parietal lobule
        
        third-person experience (other condition)
        
        (omitted in paper)
      - "Consider also the experiments of Singer and her colleagues in which people were give neither empathy training (instructions to try to feel what others were feeling) or compassion training (in which the goal is to feel positive and warm thoughts toward others without vicariously experiencing their suffering). There was a neural difference, with different brain areas becoming active during the two sorts of training."
        (Bloom, 2016)