Empathy is not in our genes

Cecilia Heyes, Empathy is not in our genes, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, Volume 95, 2018, Pages 499-507,ISSN 0149-7634, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2018.11.001.

Highlights

• Empathy is a cornerstone of healthcare, social justice, and international relations.
• Empathy depends on automatic (Empathy1) and controlled (Empathy2) mechanisms.
• The automatic mechanism, Empathy1, is constructed by associative learning.
• Self-stimulation, synchronous emotion and affect mirroring provide inputs to learning.
• Empathy can be enhanced by novel experience and broken by social change.

Abstract: In academic and public life empathy is seen as a fundamental force of morality – a psychological phenomenon, rooted in biology, with profound effects in law, policy, and international relations. But the roots of empathy are not as firm as we like to think. The matching mechanism that distinguishes empathy from compassion, envy, schadenfreude, and sadism is a product of learning. Here I present a dual system model that distinguishes Empathy1, an automatic process that catches the feelings of others, from Empathy2, controlled processes that interpret those feelings. Research with animals, infants, adults and robots suggests that the mechanism of Empathy1, emotional contagion, is constructed in the course of development through social interaction. Learned Matching implies that empathy is both agile and fragile. It can be enhanced and redirected by novel experience, and broken by social change.

Keywords: Affect mirroring; Affective empathy; Associative learning; Emotional contagion; Empathy; Empathic understanding; Learned Matching; Mirror neurons; Self-stimulation; Synchronous emotion