Psychology: Techniques and Application

Psychology: Techniques and Application ›› 2019, Vol. 7 ›› Issue (11): 683-692.doi: 10.16842/j.cnki.issn2095-5588.2019.11.006

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The Psychological Processing Mechanism of Empathy

  

  1. (1School of psychology, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210024, China) (2 Mental Health Education and Counseling Center, City college of Dongguan University of Technology, Dongguan 523000, China)
  • Online:2019-11-01 Published:2019-11-01

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Abstract: Empathy is a critical social ability to identify what other people feel or think and to respond with an adequate emotion to others feelings and thoughts. It can be divided into affective empathy and cognitive empathy, each of which has relatively independent neural network. In terms of evolution and ontogeny, affective empathy happens before cognitive empathy. There are two processing methods of empathy. One is the bottom-up empathy processing evoked by elementary emotion stimulation. First, emotional infection occurs, which in turn evokes affective empathy. Finally, cognitive empathy and affective empathy interact to produce empathy response. The other one is a top-down empathy processing triggered by advanced emotional information. Cognitive empathy evokes affective empathy through self-reflection, in which Medial Prefrontal Cortex plays a significant role. This article present a model that called Brain circuits for empathy which explains the component and process of empathy, and demonstrate the psychological processing mechanism of empathy. Future studies are needed to design a high ecological validity research paradigm, explore more objective empathy measurements, and enrich the positive empathy study.

Key words: affective empathy, cognitive empathy, bottom-up processing, top-down processing

CLC Number: 

  • B842.6
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