Schematic illustration of the macrocomponents involved in human empathy. These different components are intertwined and contribute to different aspects of the experience of empathy. They can be dissociated by brain lesions. Affective arousal: first component in place in development having evolved to differentiate hostile from hospitable stimuli and to organize adaptive responses to these stimuli. This component refers to the automatic discrimination of a stimulus – or features of a stimulus – as appetitive or aversive, hostile or hospitable, pleasant or unpleasant, threatening or nurturing. Subcortical circuits including the amygdala, hypothalamus, hippocampus and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) are the essential neural components of affective arousal. The amygdala and OFC with reciprocal connection with the superior temporal sulcus (STS) underlie rapid and prioritized processing of the emotion signal. Emotion understanding: develops later, and begins to be really mature around the age of 2–3 years. This component largely overlaps with theory-of-mind-like processing and draws on the ventromedial (vm) and medial (m) prefrontal cortex (PFC) as well as executive functions. The latter allow the child to entertain several perspectives and a decoupling mechanism between first-person and second-person information. Emotion regulation: enables the control of emotion, affect, drive and motivation. This component develops throughout childhood and adolescence, and parallels the maturation of execution functions. The dorsolateral PFC, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the vmPFC, via their reciprocal connections with the amygdala and widespread cortical areas including the STS, play a primary role in self-regulation. Humans also have the capacity to appraise and reappraise emotions and feelings. Thus, empathy is not a passive affective resonance phenomenon with the emotions of others. Rather, goals, intentions, context and motivations play feed-forward roles in how emotions are perceived and experienced. From this model, it is clear that empathy is implemented by a complex network of distributed, often recursively connected, interacting neural regions (STS, insula, mPFC and vmPFC, amygdala and ACC) as well as autonomic and neuroendocrine processes implicated in social behaviors and emotional states.

Shift in activation in the vmPFC across age when participants aged from 7 to 40 years are watching another person being intentionally hurt by another. A significant negative correlation (r = −43; p < 0.001) between age and degree of activation was detected in the medial portion of the OFC (x = 10, y = 50, z = −2), while a significant positive correlation (r = 0.34; p < 0.01) was noted in the lateral portion of the OFC (x = 38, y = 48, z = −8). Adapted from Decety and Michalska [2010].

a Subjective ratings of dynamic visual stimuli depicting painful situations accidentally caused by self (Pain CS) and painful situations intentionally caused by another individual (Pain CO) across age (in weeks) in 57 participants (from 7 to 40 years old). A gradual decrease in the subjective evaluation of pain intensity for both painful conditions was found across age, with younger participants rating them significantly higher than older participants (Pain CS: r = −0.327, p < 0.01; Pain CO: r = −0.267, p < 0.05). Further, while on average participants rated the pain caused intentionally (Pain CO) conditions as significantly more painful than when pain was accidentally caused by self (Pain CS; t₅₆ = 2.581; p < 0.01), this effect was not driven by age. b Bilateral amygdala activation. c Significant negative correlation between age and degree of activation in the amygdala when the participants are exposed to painful situations accidentally caused. Adapted from Decety and Michalska [2010].