Building an empathic brain in times of conflict & peace

Jonathan -Yoni LEVY
Empathy Building NeuroLab
Aalto University

invited by Mathilde BONNEFOND & Jérémie MATTOUT, COPHY team of CRNL

Building an empathic brain in times of conflict & peace
What is empathy? A brief common definition of this concept refers to the ability to share and understand the internal states of others. In the 20th century, this concept has been increasingly studied in philosophy and in psychological sciences, while more recently, neuroscientists have been advancing our understanding of empathy in new vistas.
There is accumulating empirical evidence showing that empathy is very important for our social life, and that deficits in empathy are abundant in multiple psychopathologies and social disorders. But in fact, all of us very often become deficient in empathy when the targets are members of other social groups: other ethnicities, political ideologies or simply people who have different beliefs and opinions than us.
In the Empathy-building Neurolab (https://www.aalto.fi/en/department-of-neuroscience-and-biomedical-engin…), we use multiple tools from neuroscience (MEG and fMRI), social psychology, political psychology, virtual-reality and philosophy – in the aim of investigating empathy. In addition, we study the impact of interventions that potentially can foster empathy particularly towards members of other social groups. In this talk, I will present some of our recent works that examines the empathic brains of individuals in Israel and in Finland.