What is empathy?

What drives our feelings of compassion for others? And when we feel empathy – what is happening in our brains?

In this BBC podcast, researchers of the Social Brain Lab at the KNAW Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience explain which processes underly empathy. Valeria Gazzola, head of the Social Brain Lab at the KNAW Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, is a pioneer in the neural basis of empathy and embodied cognition. Some of the questions the Social Brain Lab currently investigates are: What areas of the brain cause us to act prosocially? How do we learn the consequences our actions have on others? How does the brain weigh the benefits to self and the cost to others?

‘In fact we are dealing with daily dilemmas: while you are racing on your bike to be on time for an important meeting you see someone take a nasty fall. What do you do? Do you stop to help, or do you cycle on? Why do some people stop and others race past? That is what I would like to know. Empathy may seem to be an automatic reaction, but it is not necessarily innate. Children have to be taught that play can cause pain. But is this something you can only learn during a certain period of your life? Or can it still be learned at a later age? What I think is that experience plays a big part here, because empathy is a learning system.’

– Valeria Gazzola, Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam