2 Neuroscience2.7 Neural circuits
2.7.1.15 Empathy and theory of mind
2 min read2 figures
Written by Resident Doctor Committee · Published
Components of social understanding
Process | What it does | Example |
|---|---|---|
Cognitive empathy | Infers another person's feelings and their cause | Seeing embarrassment behind a smile |
Affective empathy | Responds emotionally to another person's state | Unease when watching pain |
Empathic concern | Motivates helping | Offering practical support |
Theory of mind | Represents beliefs, intentions and knowledge | Predicting where someone with a false belief will search |
Theory of mind (mentalising) is the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and to others.
Second-order mentalising concerns what one person thinks another believes; first-order concerns another person's belief.
False-belief tasks and development
False-belief tasks measure theory of mind by asking the child to predict another person's mistaken belief rather than the reality the child knows.
In the Sally-Anne test, a child who says Sally will search where she left the object, not where it now is, is using Sally's belief.
Age | Typical understanding |
|---|---|
3 years | Simpler mental-state understanding, but false belief is failed |
About 4 years | Explicit false belief is reliably passed |
6 to 7 years | Second-order false belief is passed |
Theory of mind and empathy develop through early conversation in a language fully shared with the family.
Deaf children of non-signing hearing parents are delayed, whereas natively signing deaf children of deaf parents are not.
Neural systems
Region | Contribution |
|---|---|
Medial prefrontal cortex | Traits, intentions, context and self-knowledge |
Temporoparietal junction | Attributing beliefs, including those unlike one's own |
Posterior superior temporal sulcus | Gaze, biological motion, goal-directed action |
Anterior insula | Core empathy node: shared representation of another's pain, active when pain is felt and when seen |
Right supramarginal gyrus | Separates self from other emotion, overcoming emotional egocentricity bias |
Without the right supramarginal gyrus, judgements of another person's feelings are coloured by one's own.
Mirror neurons
Mirror neurons fire both when an action is performed and when the same action is watched.
They give a shared action code, proposed as the neural basis of learning by imitation.
They are hypothesised to support empathy by letting an observer simulate and share another person's emotional state.
In humans the frontal core lies in the inferior frontal gyrus, with a second node in the inferior parietal cortex.
Autism
Mindblindness, impaired theory of mind, is the core cognitive account of the social and empathic difficulties of autism spectrum disorder.
The broken mirror hypothesis proposes that mirror neuron system dysfunction underlies those social difficulties.
Difficulty reading conventional social cues does not mean affective empathy is absent.