Review

The empathic brain and its dysfunction in psychiatric populations: implications for intervention across different clinical conditions

Jean Decety¹ and Yoshiya Moriguchi²

¹Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry, The University of Chicago, 5848 S. University Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

²Department of Psychosomatic Research, National Institute of Mental Health, National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, Ogawa-Higashi Cho, Kodaira City, Tokyo, 187-8551, Japan

author email corresponding author email

BioPsychoSocial Medicine 2007, 1:22doi:10.1186/1751-0759-1-22

Published:	16 November 2007

Abstract

Empathy is a concept central to psychiatry, psychotherapy and clinical psychology. The construct of empathy involves not only the affective experience of the other person's actual or inferred emotional state but also some minimal recognition and understanding of another's emotional state. It is proposed, in the light of multiple levels of analysis including social psychology, cognitive neuroscience and clinical neuropsychology, a model of empathy that involves both bottom-up and top-down information processing underpinned by parallel and distributed computational mechanisms. The predictive validity of this model is explored with reference to clinical conditions. As many psychiatric conditions are associated with deficits or even lack of empathy, we discuss a limited number of these disorders including psychopathy/antisocial personality disorders, borderline and narcissistic personality disorders, autistic spectrum disorders, and alexithymia. We argue that future clinical investigations of empathy disorders can only be informative if behavioral, dispositional and biological factors are combined.