Une anatomie de l’empathie

Empathy refers to an emotional response that emanates either from the emotional state of another individual or from adopting another’ psychological point of view without losing sight of whose feelings belong to whom. This response is contingent on emotional as well as cognitive factors. Empathy involves not only the affective experience of the other person’s actual or inferred emotional state but also some minimal recognition and understanding of another’s emotional state. This article proposes, in the light of multiple levels of analysis ranging from clinical psychology, cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology, a model of empathy that involves parallel and distributed processing in a number of dissociable computational mechanisms (in the prefrontal and parietal cortices of the right hemisphere). Affective sharing, self-awareness, mental flexibility and emotion regulation constitute the basic macro-components of empathy, which are underpinned by specific neural systems. This functional model is used to make specific predictions about the various empathy deficits that can be encountered in different forms of social and neurological disorders.