Response to Commentaries

First of all, let me just say that I am most grateful to all of the reviewers for such thoughtful and highly detailed commentaries, which often pointed out aspects to the literature and dimensions to what is clearly such a complex problem, aspects to which I had not given adequate thought (or, in many instances, had not had adequate time to think about or digest!). In general, although several commentaries were supportive of the general argument, some of the comments make it clear that I was not as successful as I might have hoped in attempting to outline a more integrated view of empathy as a process of necessity sitting on the emotion-cognition border. Two commentaries thought that I had given insufficient weight to mirror neuron systems (MNSs) in terms of their contribution to embodied simulation and to empathy, and in general the more “affectively oriented” the research and professional background of the commentator, the more accepting the commentator was of the basic argument in the target article. Of course, this does not suggest that I was as successful as I had hoped or, in any case, that my arguments were less than fully persuasive. I remain cautiously optimistic that in my response to commentaries, I can clarify some issues raised and suggest some future tests that might better bridge these domains of cognition and emotion.

Some preliminary general comments

Emotion cannot be reduced to just another form of cognitive processing, or “annexed” as some researchers and theorists have proposed (see Lane & Nadel, 2000). The border remains a mostly unmapped territory where we have few clearly established first principles by which to understand or structure the admittedly complex and reciprocal interactions between emotion and cognition, in which emotion has to be seen as directing and motivating cognitive processing, while cognition inhibits as well as activates and even blends various primary emotional curren