Valeria Gazzola and Christian Keysers, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam, NL: "A cross-species approach to the neural bases of empathy and prosociality"

Abstract:
How does our brain make us feel what others feel? How does it motivate us to help others? To answer these questions, the married couple of Christian and Valeria decided to join their independent labs into a single social brain lab and combine human and animal experiments. They will start by showing that while witnessing the actions of others, our premotor cortices not only respond to what they see but send predictions of upcoming actions to parietal and sensory regions, creating a predictive social brain. Concentrating on emotions, they show that in humans, the somatosensory, insular and cingulate cortices are activated both when experiencing pain and while witnessing other do so. Through a series of human and rodent examples they will then ask whether such vicarious activations have causal influences on sharing the emotions of others and on deciding to help others. They will show that the rodent cingulate cortex harbors pain mirror neurons responding to the animal’s own pain and when witnessing the pain of others, and deactivating this region blocks both an animal’s emotional response to the pain of others and their willingness to avoid actions that harm others. The homologies between humans and rodents suggest that emotion sharing is an evolutionarily conserved mechanism that allows animals and humans to better prepare for yet unseen dangers by tuning into the state of those that have already detected them. Finally, they will present work on psychopathic criminals and healthy volunteers that highlights that although these circuits may be biologically pre-wired, we have control on how much we use them. Empathy does not just happen to us: we can choose to empathize. The intertwined format of their talk is a testimony to how stimulating it can be for a couple to work together.