Stephanie D. Preston

Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases

There is disagreement in the literature about the exact nature of the phenomenon of empathy. There are emotional, cognitive, and conditioning views, applying in varying degrees across species. An adequate description of the ultimate and proximate mechanism can integrate these views. Proximately, the perception of an objects state activates the subjects corresponding representations, which in turn activate somatic and autonomic responses. This mechanism supports basic behaviors (e.g., alarm, social facilitation, vicariousness of emotions, mother-infant responsiveness, and the modeling of competitors and predators) that are crucial for the reproductive success of animals living in groups. The Perception-Action Model (PAM), together with an understanding of how representations change with experience, can explain the major empirical effects in the literature (similarity, familiarity, past experience, explicit teaching, and salience). It can also predict a variety of empathy disorders. The interaction between the PAM and prefrontal functioning can also explain different levels of empathy across species and age groups. This view can advance our evolutionary understanding of empathy beyond inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism and can explain different levels of empathy across individuals, species, stages of development, and situations.

Effects of Anticipatory Stress on Decision Making in a Gambling Task

Recent research has highlighted the fact that emotion that is intrinsic to a task benefits decision making. The authors tested the converse hypothesis, that unrelated emotion disrupts decision making. Participants played the Iowa Gambling Task, during which only experimental participants anticipated giving a public speech (A. Bechara, D. Tranel, & H. Damasio, 2000). Experimental participants who were anticipating the speech learned the contingencies of the choices more slowly, and there was a gender interaction later in the game, with stressed female participants having more explicit knowledge and more advantageous performance and stressed male participants having poorer explicit knowledge and less advantageous performance. Effects of anticipatory stress on decision making are complex and depend on both the nature of the task and the individual.

The Origins of Altruism in Offspring Care

The current review aims to unify existing views of altruism through an examination of the biological bases of a fundamental form of giving: altruistic responding. Altruistic responding is most salient during heroic acts of helping but is also observed any time one perceives anothers distress or need, which in turn motivates one to help at a current cost to the self. Such aid is simple, observable across species, and rooted in the instincts and circuits that evolved to maximize inclusive fitness through the care of helpless offspring. By design, the system already biases aid to both kin and nonkin under conditions that are largely adaptive. These inherent benefits are also buttressed in primates and humans by known, later-arriving benefits to helping in group-living animals. Evidence for the proposed homology between altruistic responding and offspring retrieval is presented through 10 key shared factors. Conceptually, both require (a) participation by nonmothers, (b) motor competence and expertise, (c) an adaptive opponency between avoidance and approach, and a facilitating role of (d) neonatal vulnerability, (e) salient distress, and (f) rewarding close contact. Physiologically, they also share neurohormonal support from (g) oxytocin, (h) the domain-general mesolimbocortical system, (i) the cingulate cortex, and (j) the orbitofrontal cortex. The framework intermixes ultimate and proximate levels of analysis and unifies existing views by assuming that even complex human behaviors reflect ancient mammalian neural systems that evolved to solve key problems in adaptive ways, with far-reaching consequences for even our most venerated human traits.

The Many Faces of Empathy: Parsing Empathic Phenomena through a Proximate, Dynamic-Systems View of Representing the Other in the Self:

A surfeit of research confirms that people activate personal, affective, and conceptual representations when perceiving the states of others. However, researchers continue to debate the role of self–other overlap in empathy due to a failure to dissociate neural overlap, subjective resonance, and personal distress. A perception–action view posits that neural-level overlap is necessary during early processing for all social understanding, but need not be conscious or aversive. This neural overlap can subsequently produce a variety of states depending on the context and degree of common experience and emotionality. We outline a framework for understanding the interrelationship between neural and subjective overlap, and among empathic states, through a dynamic-systems view of how information is processed in the brain and body.

The neural substrates of cognitive empathy

Abstract Neuroscientific research has consistently found that the perception of an affective state in another activates the observers own neural substrates for the corresponding state, which is likely the neural mechanism for “true empathy.” However, to date there has not been a brain-imaging investigation of so-called “cognitive empathy”, whereby one “actively projects oneself into the shoes of another person,” imagining someones personal, emotional experience as if it were ones own. In order to investigate this process, we conducted a combined psychophysiology and PET and study in which participants imagined: (1) a personal experience of fear or anger from their own past; (2) an equivalent experience from another person as if it were happening to them; and (3) a nonemotional experience from their own past. When participants could relate to the scenario of the other, they produced patterns of psychophysiological and neuroimaging activation equivalent to those of personal emotional imagery, but when they could not relate to the others story, differences emerged on all measures, e.g., decreased psychophysiological responses and recruitment of a region between the inferior temporal and fusiform gyri. The substrates of cognitive empathy overlap with those of personal feeling states to the extent that one can relate to the state and situation of the other.

A decision theory perspective on why women do or do not decide to have cancer screening: systematic review

AIM This paper is a report of a review in which decision theory from economics and psychology was applied to understand why some women with access to care do not seek cancer screening. BACKGROUND Mammography and cervical smear testing are effective modes of cancer screening, yet many women choose not to be screened. Nurses need to understand the reasons behind womens choices to improve adherence. DATA SOURCES Research papers published between January 1994 and November 2008 were identified using the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, MEDLINE and PsycINFO data bases. The search was performed using the following terms: cervical cancer screening, breast cancer screening, decision, choice, adherence and framing. Forty-seven papers were identified and reviewed for relevance to the search criteria. METHODS Nineteen papers met the search criteria. For each paper, reasons for obtaining or not obtaining cancer screening were recorded, and organized into four relevant decision theory principles: emotions, Prospect Theory, optimism bias and framing. FINDINGS All women have fears and uncertainty, but the sources of their fears differ, producing two main decision scenarios. Non-adherence results when women fear medical examinations, providers, tests and procedures, do not have/seek knowledge about risk and frame their current health as the status quo. Adherence is achieved when women fear cancer, but trust care providers, seek knowledge, understand risk and frame routine care as the status quo. CONCLUSION Nurses need to address proactively womens perceptions and knowledge about screening by openly and uniformly discussing the importance and benefits.

The empathic, physiological resonance of stress

Physiological resonance between individuals is considered fundamental to the biological capacity for empathy. Observers of pain and distress commonly exhibit increases in reported distress, autonomic arousal, facial mimicry, and overlapping neural activity. An important, unstudied question is whether physiological stress can also resonate. Physiological stress is operationalized as activation of the hypothalamic pituitary adrenocortical (HPA) and sympatho-adrenomedullary (SAM) axes. People often report an aversive state resulting from the stress of another, but this could be conveyed through resonating arousal or distress, without activating the physiological stress response. Physiological stress is particularly important to examine since it commonly occurs chronically, with known negative effects on health. Salivary cortisol and salivary alpha-amylase (sAA) were measured in both speakers and observers during a modified Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) to assess activation of the HPA and SAM axes (respectively). Cortisol (but not sAA) responses resonated between speakers and observers. The cortisol response of observers increased with trait empathy and was not related to the speakers subjective fear or distress. This study provides a novel method for examining physiological resonance, and indicates that we can indeed catch anothers physiological stress, suggesting a specific health risk for those in the social network of stressed individuals.

Mammalian empathy: behavioural manifestations and neural basis

Recent research on empathy in humans and other mammals seeks to dissociate emotional and cognitive empathy. These forms, however, remain interconnected in evolution, across species and at the level of neural mechanisms. New data have facilitated the development of empathy models such as the perception–action model (PAM) and mirror-neuron theories. According to the PAM, the emotional states of others are understood through personal, embodied representations that allow empathy and accuracy to increase based on the observers past experiences. In this Review, we discuss the latest evidence from studies carried out across a wide range of species, including studies on yawn contagion, consolation, aid-giving and contagious physiological affect, and we summarize neuroscientific data on representations related to anothers state.

Stress leads to prosocial action in immediate need situations

Stress clearly influences decision making, but the effects are complex. This review focuses on the potential for stress to promote prosocial decisions, serving others at a temporary cost to the self. Recent work has shown altruistic responses under stress, particularly when the target’s need is salient. We discuss potential mechanisms for these effects, including emotional contagion and offspring care mechanisms. These neurobiological mechanisms may promote prosocial—even heroic—action, particularly when an observer knows the appropriate response and can respond to a target in need. The effects of stress on behavior are not only negative, they can be adaptive and altruistic under conditions that promote survival and well-being at the individual and group level.

The meaning in empathy: Distinguishing conceptual encoding from facial mimicry, trait empathy, and attention to emotion

In order to truly empathise with another, we need to recognise and understand how they feel. Perception–action models of empathy predict that attending to anothers emotion will spontaneously activate the observers own conceptual knowledge for the state, but it is unclear how this activation is related to facial mimicry, trait empathy, or attention to emotion more generally. In the current study, participants did spontaneously encode background facial expressions at a conceptual level even though they were irrelevant to the task (the Emostroop effect; Preston & Stansfield, 2008), but this encoding was not associated with mimicry of the faces, trait empathy, the ability to resolve competing semantic representations (Colour-naming Stroop task), or the tendency to be distracted by emotional information more generally (Intrusive Cognitions task). Our results suggest that trait empathy increases attention to emotional information, but conceptual encoding occurs across individuals as a natural consequence of attended perception.