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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 3, 2026

Observational Fear as a Model of Affective Empathy in Mice

Observational Fear as a Model of Affective Empathy in Mice

Published on: November 22, 2024

Empathizing with basic emotions: common and discrete neural substrates.

Bhismadev Chakrabarti¹, Edward Bullmore, Simon Baron-Cohen

¹Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, UK. bc249@cam.ac.uk

Social Neuroscience

|July 18, 2008

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Empathy influences how we perceive basic emotions, with specific brain regions showing unique correlations with empathy levels for different emotions. A key brain region in the left frontal cortex may serve as a general empathy biomarker.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Psychology

Background:

Empathy, a trait measured by the Empathy Quotient (EQ), involves understanding and responding to others' emotions.
The discrete emotions model suggests basic emotions have distinct neural underpinnings.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how empathy influences the perception of basic emotions.
To identify brain regions associated with empathy during the perception of different emotional expressions.

Main Methods:

A correlational fMRI study involving 25 participants selected across the Empathy Quotient (EQ) spectrum.
Participants viewed video clips of happy, sad, angry, and disgust facial expressions.

Main Results:

Ventral striatal response to happy faces positively correlated with EQ; response to sad faces negatively correlated.
Precuneus and lateral prefrontal cortex response to angry faces positively correlated with EQ.
Insula and superior temporal gyrus response to disgust faces negatively correlated with EQ.
Left dorsal inferior frontal gyrus/premotor cortex showed positive correlation with EQ across all emotions, suggesting a potential empathy biomarker.

Conclusions:

Empathy has both common and emotion-specific neural correlates in emotion perception.
Specific brain regions are differentially associated with empathy depending on the perceived emotion.