I feel your pain. These words are famously associated with Bill Clinton, who as a politician seemed to ooze empathy. A skeptic might wonder, though, whether such a powerful figure really was personally distressed by the suffering of average Americans. Can people in high positions of power — be they presidents, bosses, celebrities and so […]
Feeling Others’ Pain: Transforming Empathy into Compassion
Breakthroughs in cognitive neuroscience: Highlighting influential research from the past 20 years This series explores influential papers in cognitive neuroscience, as measured by the number of times they are cited each year. The papers featured are just a sampling of many important works in the field over the past 20 years. This is the second […]
The Bonds of Empathy: From Rats to Humans Q&A with Jean Decety
Scientists are finding that empathy is not just for humans. It plays a key biological role in other animals too, and in a paper published last December in Science, University of Chicago neuroscientists Peggy Mason, Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, and Jean Decety showed that even rats display such pro-social behavior. After placing pairs of rats in […]
