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The affective feelings accompanying empathy are what make it what it is: an engine for positive social interactions, a relief from psychic solitude, and a fascinating object of study. Watt presents a framework in which attachment and prosocial motivation guide multiple aspects of affective and cognitive responses associated with empathy.
Here, both affective resonance and the motivation to improve the sufferers' affective state are core components of a “full emotional empathy.” He argues that without these components, any response or feeling on the part of the observer would fall short of empathy in this sense. In this perspective, attempts to operational-ize empathy in terms of other variables are considered to be of limited relevance in exploring its neural correlates. In particular, Watt criticizes research focusing on motor processing for failing to capture empathy's inherent affective element.
I am in wholehearted agreement that affect and motivation lie at the core of many phenomena that we would label as empathy (Morrison, 2007). However, in investigating the underlying neural systems, I believe that the motivational-affective elements involved in empathy can be fruitfully operationalized in terms of lower-level responses, motor-related responses in particular (Morrison, 2007; Morrison, Lloyd, di Pellegrino, & Roberts, 2004; Morrison, Peelen, & Downing, 2007; Morrison, Poliakoff, Gordon, & Downing, 2007). In what follows I would like to use my agreement with Watt's basic position on the importance of affect as a springboard to make the case for two points on which I differ from him.
The first is that although affective processing is not a property of the action-related premotor pathways in which mirror neurons are found, mirror-like mechanisms may nevertheless be a property of motivational-affective premotor pathways, removing the need to posit an intervening variable between motor and affective processing. The second is that the level at