Empathy and Compassion
Empirical claims
What is the paradigm?
What are the limitations of these experiments?
Which experiments test the paradigm?
Major facets of empathy (Zaki & Ochsner, 2012)
Experience sharing
Four kinds of empathy (Bloom, 2016)
to establish the proposed
categories of empathy...
Prosocial concern
empathic motivation
emotional contagion
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)
emotional contagion
sympathy
Some examples of the questions
which appear in both scales
Brain regions activated by empathic tasks (Zaki & Ochsner, 2012)
compassion
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)
first-person experience (self condition)
If I see a video of a baby smiling, I find myself smiling. (Behavioral Contagion)
isolated social cues used to probe highly context-dependent behaviour
References
"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)
nonlinearity of cognitive function
vs neural activation
neural resonance (both self and other conditions)
affective empathy
medial prefrontal cortex
Mentalizing
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.
cognitive empathy
simplified models producing
interpretational difficulties
posterior superior temporal sulcus
temporal ole
x-axis: Contagion factor loading (0.0 to 1.0)
y-axis: Other-regarding factor loading (0.0 to 1.0)
third-person experience (other condition)
"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)
Cluster # 1 (0, 0.7)
Perspective Taking, Concern
absence of brain-behaviour relationships
When I see someone being treated unfairly, I sometimes don’t feel very much pity for them. (Empathic Concern)
Cluster # 3 (0, 0.7)
Empathy, Behavioural Contagion, Personal Distress
The Moral Psychology of Compassion (2018), by Caouette, J. and Price, C.
is positive affect from the well-being
of others
Against Empathy (2017), by Bloom, P.
premotor cortex
precuneus
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)
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.
emotional empathy
cognitive empathy
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?
Are empathy and concern psychologically distinct? (2016), by Jordan, M. R., Amir, D., and Bloom, P.
is theory of mind at work: it is understanding
what someone is feeling without experiencing it
for oneself
Cluster # 2 (0.4, 0.4)
Fantasy
Empathy and Its Discontents (2016), by Bloom, P.
perspective taking
(omitted in paper)
The neuroscience of empathy: progress, pitfalls and promise (2012), by Zaki, J. and Ochsner, K. N.
We have not done the legwork to
connect psychology to neuroscience.
Why does the activation of Brain Region X
show Psychological Construct Y?
theory of mind
shared self-other representations
anterior cingulate cortex
is when one mirrors the inferred feelings of others
inferior parietal lobule
empathic concern
tempoparietal junction
I sometimes find it difficult to see things from the “other guy’s” point of view. (Perspective Taking)
is empathy that spreads through crowds;
it is feeling anxious when everyone else
is feeling anxious, or joy when everyone
is feeling joyful
Expansive empathy : normative and descriptive considerations for the cultivation of empathy (2017).Hrincu, V.