Empathy

Empathy is the ability to experience, understand and respond helpfully to other people’s states of mind.

It involves 3 processes:

    1. Affective Empathy: Experiencing what they’re experiencing. It’s like catching a cold from someone, but you’re “catching” their emotions and feelings instead.
    2. Cognitive Empathy: Understanding what they’re experiencing, how it affects them and how they may respond to it. This involves something called “Theory of Mind”.
    3. Empathic Concern: Urge to help them if your affective and/or cognitive empathy tells you they are struggling. This relates to how selfish or altruistic you are in your interactions with them.

We still don’t know the exact algorithm behind these processes, but here’s a high-level cognitive model that captures the core logic:

  1. Step 1: Perception of Emotional Cues
    • What: Noticing relevant cues in the other person’s facial expressions, body language and behaviour.
    • Where: Occipital and temporal lobes, including the fusiform gyrus.
  2. Step 2: Mirror Neuron System Activation
    • What: Your mirror neuron system activates many neurons in your brain that normally light up only when YOUR face and body move the way theirs are moving. It’s as if these neurons are mistaking the other person’s movements for your own.
    • Where: Premotor cortex, inferior parietal lobule.
  3. Step 3: Emotion Recognition System Activation
    • What: Identifying the emotions and feelings that normally produce such movements in your face and body.
    • Where: Amygdala.
  4. Step 4: Check if it’s my feelings or theirs
    • What: Checking with the system that generates and maintains a model of the other person’s mind to find out if the identified emotion is theirs or yours.
    • Where: Amygdala + Medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC).
  5. Step 5: Experiencing the feeling
    • What: The identified emotion is communicated to the system generating your subjective experiences, which results in you experiencing what they may be feeling – the end result of affective empathy.
    • Where: Amygdala + Anterior insula.
  1. Step 1: Perception of Emotional Cues
    • What: Noticing relevant cues in the other person’s facial expressions, body language and behaviour.
    • Where: Occipital and temporal lobes, including the fusiform gyrus.
  2. Step 2: Making Sense of the Cues
    • What: Decoding the meaning behind the observed cues to predict what emotion, feeling, intention or thought may be causing them. Ex: “These expressions mean sadness”
    • Where: Superior temporal sulcus (STS).
  3. Step 3: Modelling their Mind
    • What: The decoded cues are sent to the system that generates and maintains a model of the other person’s mind. The better this model is, the more accurate your predictions about them will be.
    • Where: Medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC).
  4. Step 4: Predict how their mind reacts
    • What: Playing around with their mental model to simulate how it might react to the states of mind predicted by the deciphered cues.
    • Where: STS, mPFC.
  5. Step 5: Understanding their state of mind
    • What: Learning from these simulations to understand how their mind might react to its current state, what can make them feel better or worse, etc. This is what results in Cognitive Empathy.
    • Where: mPFC, Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC), Temporoparietal Junction (TPJ).
  • Step 1: Processing Their Mental State
    • What: Processing the experiences and understanding resulting from your affective and cognitive empathy systems.
    • Where: Medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).
  • Step 2: Self vs Other Bias
    • What: This information is combined with signals about the state of your mind & body to decide how much you’ll prioritise managing their condition vs your condition. i.e. Altruism vs Selfishness.
    • Where: Medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).
  • Step 3: Evaluation of Options
    • What: Assess the potential actions and their impacts on the other person and yourself. If you can’t come up with any action that can help them, you are unlikely to help them even if you want to.
    • Where: mPFC, ACC, orbitofrontal cortex (OFC).
  • Step 4: Decision Making
    • What: Make a decision based on the above factors, contextualised to your environment, current state and social contexts.
    • Where: mPFC, ACC, OFC.

If any of these steps are disrupted, it affects how you experience empathy.

Here are some examples from the model for Affective Empathy, just to illustrate potential uses for such a model:

  • If Step 1 fails, you may not even notice that something is happening to the person in front of you (ex: in many cases of autism).
  • If step 2 fails, watching a human being feels more or less the same as watching an object (ex: in severe autism).
  • If step 3 fails, you may feel something but not know what you’re feeling (ex: in alexithymia).
  • If step 4 fails, you may confuse their feelings for your own feelings (ex: in many empaths).
  • If step 5 fails, detecting the other person’s feelings does not translate into your own experience of sadness (ex: in psychopathy)

We can predict what kind of activities or techniques may help you improve your empathy based on which step or steps your difficulties may be coming from.

This approach of using cognitive models to predict potential causes of your symptoms and difficulties is still in its early stages, but I love its ability to make specific and testable predictions – without which, are we really doing science?.

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