Empathy is a lay term that is becoming increasingly viewed as a unitary function within the field of cognitive neuroscience. In this paper, a selective review of the empathy literature is provided. It is argued from this literature that empathy is not a unitary system but rather a loose collection of partially dissociable neurocognitive systems. In particular, three main divisions can be made: ...

Harari, Shamay-Tsoory, Ravid, and Levkovitz (2010) demonstrated a "double dissociation" in empathy in borderline personality disorder (BPD), such that BPD patients had higher affective than cognitive empathy, whereas controls exhibited the opposite pattern. Two processes that may relate to this dissociation are emotion dysregulation (ER) and hypermentalization. However, these interrelated proce...

Research supports an "ingroup empathy hypothesis" of higher empathy-related psychophysiological responses towards individuals of the same ethnicity. However, little research has investigated empathy-related responses to non-human targets graded for phylogenetic relatedness. Participants (N=73) were presented with film stimuli depicting humans, primates, quadruped mammals and birds in victimized...

Empathy is important to patient care. It enhances patients' satisfaction, comfort, self-efficacy, and trust which in turn may facilitate better diagnosis, shared decision making, and therapy adherence. Empathetic doctors experience greater job satisfaction and psychological well-being. Understanding the development of empathy of tomorrow's health care professionals is important. However, clinic...

To what extent can simple mental exercises cause shifts in empathic habits? Can we use mobile technology to make people more empathic? It may depend on how empathy is measured. Scholars have identified a number of different facets and correlates of empathy. This study is among the first to take a comprehensive, multidimensional approach to empathy to determine how empathy training could affect ...

BACKGROUND The literature indicates that medical practitioners experience declining empathy levels in clinical practice. This highlights the need to educate medical students about empathy as an attribute early in the academic curriculum. The objective of this study was to evaluate year one students' self-reported empathy levels following a 2-hour empathy workshop at a large medical school in Ma...

Although the study of empathy within the helping professions has a long history, it is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon, whose precise definition remains elusive. Despite the ambiguous nature of empathy, it has been theorized to be an important relationship variable that positively affects client outcomes in medicine and psychotherapy. However, since numerous problems exist in the measurement...

Empathy refers to the thoughts and feelings of one individual in response to the observed (emotional) experiences of another individual. Empathy, however, can occur toward persons experiencing a variety of emotions, raising the question of whether or not empathy can be emotion specific. This paper discusses theoretical and empirical support for the emotion specificity of empathy. We present a n...

The Young Children's Empathy Measure is a brief measure of young children's cognitive and affective perspective taking developed to assess preschool children's empathy. The Cronbach alpha coefficient of internal reliability for the empathy score was acceptable and interrater reliability across four rates was very high. The children's empathy scores were correlated with their ages and social dev...

Previous research has demonstrated the influence of parenting on the development of children's empathy. However, few studies have considered the impact of parents on empathy in adulthood, specific components of empathy, or the importance of parent and child biological sex. In the present study, 226 participants (71 men) completed online versions of the Parental Bonding Instrument (Parker et al....