Commentary on “Toward a Neuroscience of Empathy: Integrating Affective and Cognitive Perspectives”

The article by Douglas Watt provides a thorough and thought-provoking review of the contemporary neuro-scientific accounts of emotion and empathy and proposes an integration of the affective and cognitive views on these topics. A first distinctive feature of Watt's approach to empathy is the relevance—or even primacy—he attributes to attachment as the key factor in evoking empathic responses toward others. According to Watt, empathy is fundamentally a protective and nurturing response to suffering in another. A second feature of Watt's model is the supposition of a “global gate” controlling the activation of empathic responses. This global gate is admittedly “poorly understood”; however, it is proposed that global gate computations are variations of attachment-related approach mechanisms, whose role should consist in determining the extent of “resonance induction” for the empathizing subject.

In the present commentary I first focus on Watt's definition of empathy, by discussing his proposal that the notion of empathy should incorporate the intrinsic motivation to relieve the distress of empathized others. I then challenge Watt's claims that the neural mechanisms underpinning emotional contagion “remain elusive” and that the shared neural representations instantiated by mirror neurons and related mirroring mechanisms in the human brain qualify as a late developmental outcome of voluntary and highly cognitive strategies.