JCB • VOLUME 172 • NUMBER 5 • 2006 640 T he sympathetic nervous system prepares the body for emergencies. Heart rate and blood pressure rise, pupils dilate, blood is shunted from skin to muscle, and the gut shuts down. Now, Yoshio Katayama, Paul Frenette (Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY), and colleagues suggest another consequence of sympathetic nervous system activation: hematopoi...

Although a goal of many aggression intervention programs is to increase children's concern (often termed sympathy or empathy) for their peers as a means of ultimately reducing aggressive behavior, there are no measures specifically of children's concern for peers who are the targets of peer aggression. A participatory action research (PAR) model was used to create a culturally-sensitive measure...

BACKGROUND Compassion is considered an essential element in quality patient care. One of the conceptual challenges in healthcare literature is that compassion is often confused with sympathy and empathy. Studies comparing and contrasting patients' perspectives of sympathy, empathy, and compassion are largely absent. AIM The aim of this study was to investigate advanced cancer patients' unders...

Why do some victims elicit outpourings of sympathy from those who are unaffected, while others do not? The authors propose a theoretical framework for making sense of the vicissitudes of sympathy based on the interaction between two qualitatively different mental processes. One, which the authors term “sympathy,” is caring but immature and irrational. The other process, which the authors term “...

In this paper, we propose a new approach to emotional interaction of software agents with human users. The basic idea comes from Wallon’s theory of human primary development. By assuming an innate structure used in common with both sympathy and social conditioning, we propose a fundamental agent architecture. With this architecture, we make a few experiments, basically for testing conditioning ...

In sentencing guilty defendants, jurors and judges weigh 'mitigating circumstances', which create sympathy for a defendant. Here we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure neural activity in ordinary citizens who are potential jurors, as they decide on mitigation of punishment for murder. We found that sympathy activated regions associated with mentalising and moral conflict (dorso...