Mirror-touch synaesthesia: the role of shared ... - UCL Discovery

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Chapter 4
emotional empathy being linked to lesions to the human mirror system and cognitive
empathy being associated to lesions to the ventromedial prefrontal cortices (Shamay-
Tsoory, Aharon-Peretz, and Perry, 2009). This functional coupling between
emotional and cognitive empathy suggests that emotional empathy may be linked
more closely to sensorimotor simulation of another’s state and the evidence that
mirror-touch synaesthetes only significantly differ from controls on levels of
emotional reactivity is consistent with this.
Two qualifications are apposite: (a) it remains unclear whether heightened
emotional reactivity reflects differences in the nature of the individual (i.e. more
emotional or more distressed by emotional scenes as opposed to more empathic /
concerned), and (b) evidence of a borderline significant difference on cognitive
empathy suggests that differences in empathy may not be limited to emotional
empathy per se. To further address these issues a second experiment was conducted.
4.3 Experiment 2: Empathy and personality in mirror-touch synaesthesia
While findings from experiment 1 indicate that mirror-touch synaesthesia is
related to heightened emotional empathy, it remains unclear if the emotional reactivity
component of the EQ reflects the nature of the individual (i.e. more emotional / more
distressed) rather than emotional empathy per se (Muncer and Ling, 2006).
Moreover, the emotional reactivity subscale of the EQ fails to consider the role of
personal distress (an emotionally specific response to one’s own state rather than an
emotional response related to emotional empathy) and thus it is difficult to confirm
whether responses on the emotional reactivity component are indeed other (e.g.
feeling compassion or sorrow towards to another person) rather than self-oriented
(e.g. feeling distress from an unpleasant scene rather than feeling sorrow or concern;
c.f. Batson, 1991; Davis, 1994; Lamm, Batson, and Decety, 2007; Saarela,