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The Neurodevelopment of Empathy in Humans
Abstract
Empathy, which implies a shared interpersonal experience, is implicated in many aspects of social cognition, notably prosocial behavior, morality and the regulation of aggression. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the current knowledge in developmental and affective neuroscience with an emphasis on the perception of pain in others. It will be argued that human empathy involves several components: affective arousal, emotion understanding and emotion regulation, each with different developmental trajectories. These components are implemented by a complex network of distributed, often recursively connected, interacting neural regions including the superior temporal sulcus, insula, medial and orbitofrontal cortices, amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex, as well as autonomic and neuroendocrine processes implicated in social behaviors and emotional states. Decomposing the construct of empathy into subcomponents that operate in conjunction in the healthy brain and examining their developmental trajectory provides added value to our current approaches to understanding human development. It can also benefit our understanding of both typical and atypical development.
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“The period of school age is typically a pivotal phase in emotional development.”
From What underlies emotion regulation abilities? An innovative programme based on an integrative developmental approach to improve emotional competencies: Promising results in children with Prader–Willi syndrome (2022) · cites this paper as [3]
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“From a developmental perspective, the different EC emerge in a hierarchical manner across childhood and adolescence (3–5).”
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“During this period, the process of “emotion theorizing” is strongly accentuated in the light of the development of other skill areas [cognitive, socialization, learning, autonomy; (3, 7)].”
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The functional architecture of human empathy
Decety, J., & Jackson, P. L. (2004) · Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews · doi:10.1177/1534582304267187 · Cited by 3,407 · cited 1×
“Most scholars agree that empathy includes both cognitive and affective components [Decety and Jackson, 2004; Eisenberg and Eggum, 2009; Hodges and Klein, 2001] that have different developmental trajectories.”
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“An experience of emotion is a state of mind the content of which is at once affective (pleasant or unpleasant) and conceptual (a representation of the individual relation to the surrounding world) [Barrett et al., 2007].”
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Toward a second-person neuroscience
Schilbach, L., Timmermans, B., Reddy, V., Costall, A., Bente, G., Schlicht, T., & Vogeley, K. (2013) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · doi:10.1017/s0140525x12000660 · Cited by 1,510
Putting together phylogenetic and ontogenetic perspectives on empathy
Decety, J., & Svetlova, M. (2012) · Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience · doi:10.1016/j.dcn.2011.05.003 · Cited by 508
The contribution of emotion and cognition to moral sensitivity: A neurodevelopmental study
Decety, J., Michalska, K. J., & Kinzler, K. D. (2012) · Cerebral Cortex · doi:10.1093/cercor/bhr111 · Cited by 482
Cox, C. L., Uddin, L. Q., Di Martino, A., Castellanos, F. X., Milham, M. P., & Kelly, C. (2012) · Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience · doi:10.1093/scan/nsr051 · Cited by 333
Rodent empathy and affective neuroscience
Panksepp, J. B., & Lahvis, G. P. (2011) · Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews · doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2011.05.013 · Cited by 224
Metadata
- Authors
- Decety, J.
- Venue
- Developmental Neuroscience
- Publisher
- S. Karger AG
- Published
- 2010
- Volume
- 32
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 257-267
- ISSN
- 0378-5866
- 1421-9859
- Cited by
- 549
- References
- 10
- Language
- en
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