Empathy and Mirror Neurons

By Ashley K. Allen, MSW Student University of Utah

March 31, 2023

What is Empathy?

Empathy is defined as the ability to both understand and share the feelings of another person (Oxford American Dictionary, n.d.). Empathy occurs when someone we are with is experiencing a specific emotion and we take their perspective, briefly mimic the emotion (which signals to our emotion brain what the person is feeling), then understand the emotion of another once the information is sent back to our pre-frontal cortex for processing. So empathy is a brain process and it involves our emotional lambic brain and our PFC. Empathy means really understanding what someone is going through and recognizing “it sucks from down here” rather than assuming the thing the person is going through sucks (or stating “it looks bad from up here”).

Why does empathy matter?

Empathy enables positive social interaction by helping us to predict and understand how others are feeling so we can respond appropriately. Empathy is not an innate ability; empathy is a skill that can be developed since the ability to empathize is adaptive and not demanded in order to survive. We can choose to not be affected by others’ suffering by ignoring or not paying attention to them or allowing 0ur thoughts or beliefs to override our “emotional circuit.”