An in‐depth and critical discussion of the findings of recent studies showing that empathy is a highly flexible phenomenon, and that vicarious responses are malleable with respect to a number of factors.
A quantitative meta-analysis of 70 functional neuroimaging studies demonstrates that the right inferior parietal cortex is also engaged in lower-level (bottom-up) computational processes associated with the sense of agency and reorienting attention to salient stimuli.
The view that humans' responses to the pain of others can be modulated by cognitive and motivational processes, which influence whether observing a conspecific in need of help will result in empathic concern, an important instigator for helping behavior, is supported.
It is argued that empathy involves both emotion sharing and executive control to regulate and modulate this experience (top-down information processing), underpinned by specific and interacting neural systems.
The findings elucidate how top-down control mechanisms and automatic bottom-up processes interact to generate and modulate other-oriented responses, and shed light on how emotional and bodily awareness enable us to evaluate the sensory and affective states of others.
A model is presented suggesting that AI is not only involved in representing current states, but also in predicting emotional states relevant to the self and others, and implies that AI plays a dominant role in decision making in complex and uncertain environments.
It is observed that, compared with a memory control group, compassion training elicited activity in a neural network including the medial orbitofrontal cortex, putamen, pallidum, and ventral tegmental area--brain regions previously associated with positive affect and affiliation.
This study extends previous models of social cognition and shows that although shared neural networks may underlie emotional understanding in some situations, an additional mechanism subserved by rSMG is needed to avoid biased social judgments in other situations.