BEHAVIORAL AND COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE REVIEWS
Decety, Jackson / FUNCTIONAL ARCHITECTURE OF HUMAN EMPATHY Jean Decety Philip L. Jackson
University of Washington Empathy accounts for the naturally occurring subjective experi- enceofsimilaritybetweenthefeelingsexpressedbyselfandothers withoutloosingsightofwhosefeelingsbelongtowhom.Empathy involves not only the affective experience of the other person’s actual or inferred emotional state but also some minimal recog- nition and understanding ofanother’semotionalstate. Inlight of multiple levels of analysis ranging from developmental psy - chology, social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical neuropsychology, this article proposes a model of empathy that involves parallel and distributed processing in a number of dissociablecomputationalmechanisms.Sharedneuralrepresen- tations, self-awareness, mental flexibility, and emotion regula- tionconstitutethebasicmacrocomponentsofempathy,whichare underpinned by specific neural systems. This functional model maybeusedtomakespecificpredictionsaboutthevariousempa- thy deficits that can be encountered in different forms of social and neurological disorders