I Feel How You Feel but Not Always: the Empathic Brain and Its Modulation

The ability to share the other's feelings, known as empathy, has recently become the focus of social neuroscience studies. We review converging evidence that empathy with, for example, the pain of another person, activates part of the neural pain network of the empathizer, without first hand pain stimulation to the empathizer's body. The amplitude of empathic brain responses is modulated by the intensity of the displayed emotion, the appraisal of the situation, characteristics of the suffering person such as perceived fairness, and features of the empathizer such as gender or previous experience with pain-inflicting situations. Future studies in the field should address inter-individual differences in empathy, development and plasticity of the empathic brain over the life span, and the link between empathy, compassionate motivation, and prosocial behavior.