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Our ability to have an experience of another's pain is characteristic of empathy. Using functional imaging, we assessed brain activity while volunteers experienced a painful stimulus and compared it to that elicited when they observed a signal indicating that their loved one-present in the same room-was receiving a similar pain stimulus. Bilateral anterior insula (AI), rostral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), brainstem, and cerebellum were activated when subjects received pain and also by a signal that a loved one experienced pain. AI and ACC activation correlated with individual empathy scores. Activity in the posterior insula/secondary somatosensory cortex, the sensorimotor cortex (SI/MI), and the caudal ACC was specific to receiving pain. Thus, a neural response in Al and rostral ACC, activated in common for "self" and "other" conditions, suggests that the neural substrate for empathic experience does not involve the entire "pain matrix." We conclude that only that part of the pain network associated with its affective qualities, but not its sensory qualities, mediates empathy.
Human survival depends on the ability to function effectively within a social context. Central to successful social interaction is the ability to understand others intentions and beliefs. This capacity to represent mental states is referred to as "theory of mind" (1) or the ability to "mentalize" (2). Empathy, by contrast, broadly refers to being able to understand what others feel, be it an emotion or a sensory state. Accordingly, empathie experience enables us to understand what it feels like when someone else experiences sadness or happiness, and also pain, touch, or tickling (3).
Even though empathy has been extensively discussed and investigated by philosophers and social scientists, only recently has it become a focus for neuroscience (3-8). Influenced by perception-action models of motor behavior and imitation (9), Preston and de Waal (8) proposed a model of empathy that incorporates most theoretical accounts of, as well as empirical findings on, empathy. The key suggestion is that observation or imagination of another person in a particular emotional state automatically activates a representation of that state in the observer, with its associated autonomie and somatic responses ("automatic" refers to a process that does not require conscious and effortful processing but can nevertheless be inhibited or controlled). The philosopher Susanne Langer has described it as...