Cognitive Empathy and Perspective Taking: Understanding the Mechanisms of Normal and Abnormal Experiences and Abilities

Human behaviour is largely based on our understanding and interpretation of the feelings and actions of others. In order to function in and adapt to this social world, we rely on social cognitive processes such as empathy and perspective taking. Empathy is now commonly characterised as consisting of cognitive and affective components. Cognitive empathy is defined as the ability to construct a working model of the emotional states of others and importantly entails the comprehension of another person’s emotional experience. This can be achieved by actively imagining what another person may be feeling or by intuitively putting oneself in another person’s position; processes joined under the header perspective taking. Our ability to understand another person’s internal states relies on the complex integration of our representations of this person’s feelings with our beliefs about their feelings within specific contexts, while simultaneously maintaining the distinction between our own internal states and those of others.

This Research Topic aims to provide a more comprehensive picture of the mechanisms underlying cognitive empathy and perspective taking. By collating research consisting of neuroimaging discoveries, together with detailed neuropsychological, pharmacological and behavioural findings in healthy, clinical and at-risk populations, we aim to increase understanding of the neural and behavioural mechanisms of normal and abnormal cognitive empathic experiences and perspective taking abilities.

We encourage submissions or original empirical articles from all areas of neuroscience, social and behavioural sciences. Investigations in healthy, clinical and at-risk populations using neuroimaging, neuropsychological, pharmacological, and behavioural assessments with content addressing these specific themes are of special interest:

• Egocentric (self) and allocentric (other) empathic attributions.
• In-group versus out-group relationships.
• Individual differences in cognitive empathy and perspective taking across the healthy and clinical divides.
• Effect of comorbidities on cognitive empathy and perspective taking.
• Innovative methods for investigating empathy and perspective taking and their neurobiological and behavioural mechanisms.

Submission of a robust systematic review or meta-analysis is welcome. Mixed method approaches are encouraged.