The evolving empathy: Hardwired bases of human and nonhuman primate empathy

Abstract

Empathy has always been hard to operationalize. A communication gap between psychologists and neurobiologists delayed the study of empathic processes for long, but in recent years, with the discovery of mirror neurons, the finally found neurological  substrate of the much discussed “embodiement of observed behaviours” envisaged by psychophysiologists, a revolution in the way we understand emotion.  Neuroscientists are coming ever closer to social psychologists in finding the substrate for the proposed relations between gender, mimicry, emotional contagion and empathy. Furthermore, they are stumping on evidence of empathy in non-human animals. In this paper we describe different types and components of empathy, with a particular emphasis on the Perception-Action Model (Preston and de Waal, 2002), and overview the discovery of the mirror neurons and its implication to empathy and its biological evolution.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17575/rpsicol.v24i2.310