Empathy

The ability to share the feelings of others (empathy) is a vital aspect of human social interaction. This topic has been widely studied across a number of domains, with recent findings in social neuroscience shedding light on the neurocognitive processes that are involved in empathy. In this chapter, we review these findings by discussing what constitutes empathy and paradigms developed to assess empathy; what the neural correlates of empathy are and factors that mediate the empathic brain; and a prevailing model of empathy that attempts to explain how empathy takes place. Throughout, we discuss the role of interindividual differences by focusing on the relationship between variability in empathy traits and the neural correlates of empathy within typical adults, how individual differences in factors related to higher-order control (e.g., expertise) mediate empathic brain responses, and how the empathic brain responds in atypical groups.