BACKGROUND Emotional impairments constitute a crucial and widely described dimension of alcoholism, but several affective abilities are still to be thoroughly explored among alcohol-dependent patients. This is particularly true for empathy, which constitutes an essential emotional competence for interpersonal relations and has been shown to be highly impaired in various psychiatric states. The ...

We perform appropriate social actions in the various scenes of everyday life. For example, we speculate about other people's intentions and feelings in order to understand them, or inhibit negative emotions such as anger toward them. Furthermore, we engage in altruistic behaviors out of consideration and empathy for unrelated others. Even for a person who we do not like, we can also be sensitiv...

Interpersonal touch is of paramount importance in human social bonding and close relationships, allowing a unique channel for affect communication. So far the effect of touch on human physiology has been studied at an individual level. The present study aims at extending the study of affective touch from isolated individuals to truly interacting dyads. We have designed an ecological paradigm wh...

Abundant evidence across the behavioral and social sciences suggests that there are substantial individual differences in pro-social behavior. However, little is known about the psychological mechanisms that underlie social preferences. This paper investigates whether empathy and Theory of Mind shape individual differences in pro-social behavior as conventionally observed in neutrally framed so...

Empathy, feeling what others feel, is regarded as a special phenomenon that is separate from other emotional experiences. Emotion theories say little about feeling emotions for others and empathy theories say little about how feeling emotions for others relates to normal firsthand emotional experience. Current empathy theories focus on how we feel emotions for others who feel the same thing, bu...

[This corrects the article on p. 161 in vol. 6, PMID: 25750631.].

Most accounts of empathy acknowledge the importance of shared experience, but debate continues regarding the precise mechanism and necessity of similarity for an empathic response. The perception-action model posits that empathy and understanding are processed through observers’ own internal representations for states and situations, which increase in complexity with experience and produce more...

The processing of emotional faces and bodies has been associated with brain regions related to empathic responding in interpersonal contexts. The aim of the present Electroencephalography (EEG) study was to investigate differences in the time course underlying the processing of bodies and faces showing neutral, happy, or angry expressions. The P100 and N170 were analyzed in response to the pres...

A software product’s acceptance depends on the user experience that it provides to its users. The software product must meet the user needs, and one way to understand those needs is through creation of Personas. The Personas technique allows describing the users’ characteristics, goals and skills. The Empathy Map (EM) method can be used to describe personas. The EM’s goal is to create a degree ...

MacKayfs initial chapter of this book demonstrates the complexity of the empathy construct by reviewing various definitions and conceptualizations of empathy. The present chapter analyzes empathy as a personality disposition. Empathy-like any personality disposition-possesses four levels of meaning. These four levels of meaning are: (1) global, evaluative impressions about an actor perceived by...