This Issue

This issue's Target Article and the associated Commentaries come to grips with a central issue in the theory of empathy, and indeed of affective neuroscience. This is the question of how affects are subjectively experienced and communicated. At issue is the level at which empathy can occur. Does it begin with cortical appreciation via the mirror neuron system and then produce an “embodied simulation” of the affect, or is empathy the gated “contagion” of emotion which immediately engages the deepest neurological brainstem centers? The debate hinges on the emphasis placed on the mirror neuron system, as opposed to a direct contagion by an as-yet-unknown mechanism. Thus the author and the extremely articulate commentators are grappling with one of the most crucial issues in affect theory today.

Here we offer a few introductory remarks with an eye to integrating the Target Article and Commentaries. The paper, in the tradition of Dr. Watt's other writings, is an encyclopedic review of what is known about empathy, all the way up to the cutting edge. One crucial part of his model is that empathy is a gated resonance system by which one person apprehends the emotional state of another. Gating refers to the fact that certain “gates” open one to greater empathy: attachment and affectionate bonds with the other, the inherent em-pathic capacities of the empathizing person, the youth and “cuteness” of the other, a positive emotional state toward the other. These factors are not particularly controversial. The major controversy arises from an issue that goes back a long way in academic psychology—namely, the respective roles of cognition and emotion. Until very recently academic psychology focused on the cognitive aspects of the brain and tended to ignore the emotion systems. Jaak Panksepp is one of the leaders of the revolution that brought emotion into center stage and that, in fact, brought in the emotions of other animals. And this was against much resistance.