Two Routes to Empathy: Insights from Cognitive Neuroscience

This article proposes a distinction between two kinds of empathy, or routes to empathy: mirroring empathy and reconstructive empathy. The focus is on a minimal sense of empathy, i.e., interpersonal mental isomorphism. Research on mirror systems indicates that isomorphisms are produced, largely automatically, across several domains: motor planning, touch, pain, and disgust. A second route to empathy is less automatic, and appears to be subserved by a core brain network dedicated to shifting perspective from the immediate environment to an alternative situation. Carroll and Buckner (2007) hypothesize the use of this network to implement four forms of selfprojection: remembering the past, thinking about the future (prospection), representing the viewpoint of others (mindreading), and navigation. The third kind of self-projection is empathy (of the second variety). A possible common signature of this system is the presence of analogous egocentric biases in high-level mindreading and episodic memory. The article concludes with some speculation about which form of empathy is "superior".