ABSTRACT
Empathy is a complex psychological response in which observation, memory, knowledge, and reasoning are combined to yield insights into the thoughts and feelings of others (Ickes, 1997). There is broad agreement about two primary components of empathy: (1) an affective response to another person, which may (but not always) entail sharing that person’s emotional state; and (2) a cognitive capacity to take the other person’s perspective (e.g., Batson, 1991; Hodges & Wegner, 1997). Definitional variations on these general statements abound. However, virtually all empathy researchers agree that empathy requires making a link between the self and other, but without confusing the self and other. With this point in mind, our goal in this chapter is to bridge social psychological studies of empathy with findings from neuroscience in order to identify the fundamental neural mechanisms that could serve as the basis for empathy.
