ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the macroscopic perspective – the neural representations of empathy in the human brain. It discusses the clinical evidence from focal lesion studies on the neural basis of empathy, with a particular focus on group-level analyses. The chapter describes the neuroimaging studies that examine brain activities during tasks designed to produce empathy in healthy participants. It examines the correlation between brain injuries and impairments in empathy in clinical populations. The use of neurodegenerative diseases as lesion models has become increasingly common in clinical neuroscience. The neuroimaging technique used by most social neuroscience studies is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The chapter also discusses the recent neuroimaging findings on neural mimicry/synchrony, emotional contagion, and finally affective perspective taking. Emotional contagion describes an automatic mimicry and convergence of emotion when a person responds to the perceived emotion of others.
