Jean Decety

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Jean Decety, 2012

Jean Decety (* 1960 ) is a French-American neuroscientist and expert in the field of social neuroscience . Research into the neurobiological foundations of interpersonal processes in general, as well as empathy , sympathy and emotional self-regulation in particular, form the focus of his research. Decety holds the Irving B. Harris Professorship at the University of Chicago .

Life

Jean Decety completed his studies at the Université Claude Bernard ( University of Lyon I ) with two masters degrees in neurosciences (1985) and bio / medical technology (1987) and a Ph.D. in Neurobiology (1989). After completing his doctorate, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Neurophysiology and Neuroradiology at Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm , Sweden under the direction of Per Roland. He then worked at the Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale (INSERM) in Lyon until 2001 .

Decety is a professor in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Chicago and its college. He is also director of the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory and co-director of the Brain Imaging Center Brain Research Imaging Center. Decety is also a member of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience and the Center for Integrative Neuroscience and Neuroengineering.

Jean Decety is married to Sylvie Bendier and has two children (Nathan and Glenn Ariel).

In 2013 he received the Jean Louis Signoret Prize .

Journalistic activity

Decety is editor-in-chief of the specialist journal “Social Neuroscience” and a member of the editorial team of “TheScientificWorldJOURNAL” and “Neuropsychologia”. He is also on the advisory board of the France Chicago Center.

Previous Research: Cognitive Neuroscience

As part of his doctorate, Jean Decety combined behavioral data and physiological measurements with functional imaging of the brain in order to research the neural basis of the mental simulation of actions (cf. cognitive neuroscience ). This technique, known as "Mental Practice of Action" or "Motor Imagery", is used by athletes to improve their motor skills. In his experiments, Jean Decety was able to show that mental simulation of actions activates physiological mechanisms for controlling heart rate and breathing , as well as the underlying neural networks ( supplementary motor area , premotor cortex , cerebellum , parietal cortex and basal ganglia ) almost as strongly as the Carrying out the actual action itself. These systems are also active when looking only at the actions of other people.

These research results support the so-called Common Coding Theory developed by Roger Sperry , which is also represented by the German psychologist Wolfgang Prinz . The key message of this theory is that actions are coded in terms of the perceptible effects they cause. Decety and his colleagues assume that this interaction of perception and action is an important prerequisite for social understanding and forms a functional bridge between self and other perspectives.

Current field of research: Social neurosciences

Research into the neural basis of empathy , sympathy , distress , action awareness , perspective taking, emotional regulation and moral consideration is the focus of current research projects. Decety and his colleagues were recently able to show that viewing pain in other people activates the same neural circuits that perceiving pain in one's own body. This basic sensorimotor response to the distress of other people plays an essential role in the development of empathy and moral reflection . Recognizing this connection is meaningful insofar as it enables a better understanding of various clinical pictures that are associated with a reduced ability to empathize and an underdeveloped moral understanding.

In the context of current studies, Decety and his colleagues are researching changes in neural networks that underlie emotional regulation and empathy, including on people in prison with dissocial personality disorders and on children with conduct disorder , using a wide variety of methods ( functional magnetic resonance imaging , diffusion tensor Imaging , analysis of eye movements and pupillometry , measurement of the response of the autonomic nervous system and studies of behavior ). Decety cooperates with various universities in the USA , as well as in Chile , Taiwan , Japan and Germany .

Contributions to empathy research

According to Jean Decety, empathy requires the ability to perceive one's own feelings and those of others and to integrate them into a picture, whereby the correct assignment of the origin of the emotions in the sense of “being mine” must be guaranteed. Empathy thus allows us to quickly and automatically participate in the emotional life of our fellow human beings and becomes an indispensable component of successful social interaction . According to the theories on the development of moral behavior, this empathy forms the essential basis of moral understanding and action and thus becomes the most important motivation for altruism , but also helps to avoid antisocial behavior . Many psychiatric and psychosomatic illnesses are associated with a reduced ability to empathize, which is based on structural and functional changes in the underlying neural circuits. According to Decety, empathic experience requires three interacting and actually inseparable basic components: For example, emotional participation (1.) is based on attention (2.) to one's own and other people's emotions and becomes more affective through emotional regulation (3.) in the sense of preventing excessive affective Controlled reactions. Only this last ability, which is so essential for the essence of empathy, makes it possible to classify the feelings in the sense of preserving “my own being”. Decety argues that an impairment of this regulatory function leads to excessive self-reference as a response to the perception of other people's emotions and to distress. Provided that our emotional interpersonal experience is essentially based on the perception and interpretation of the actions of our counterpart, the awareness of the origin of one's own actions and those of others gains an essential meaning beyond pure motor function and interaction. This closes the circle with Jean Decety's earlier research on the perception and planning of actions. In practice, the empathy for pain has proven to be a suitable model for participatory experience insofar as it is a fundamental experience and already a well-founded knowledge of the neurophysiological processes and the brain areas involved ( somatosensory cortex , supplementary motor area , anterior cingular cortex , Insula , periaqueductal gray and thalamus ).

In a series of imaging studies and magnetoencephalography experiments, Decety and his colleagues were able to show that participation in the pain of another person triggers aversion in the viewer, which is mediated by areas of the brain, which are involved in the processing of nociceptive information as somatosensory mirror neuron areas. This sympathy allows an integration of the affective experience of other people and one's own emotional experience with consequences on the behavioral level. Together with other influencing factors such as personal disposition, biography, motivation , context and the ability for emotional self-regulation, the degree of overlapping of the activation of the neural pain matrices of the observer and the person directly experiencing pain leads to distress in the viewer in the sense of an egocentric motivation, or to sympathy and altruism as an expression of a human-centered emotional response. This distinction relates to the results of research by social psychologist Daniel Batson, with whom Decety collaborates.

Selected works

  • Decety, J. & Cowell, J. M (2014). The complex relation between morality and empathy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18, 337-339.
  • Decety, J. (2007). A social cognitive neuroscience model of human empathy. In E. Harmon-Jones & P. ​​Winkielman (Eds.), Social Neuroscience: Integrating Biological and Psychological Explanations of Social Behavior (pp. 246-270). New York: Guilford Publications.
  • Lamm, C., Batson, CD, & Decety, J. (2007). The neural substrate of human empathy: effects of perspective-taking and cognitive appraisal. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 42-58.
  • Decety, J., & Grezes, J. (2006). The power of simulation: Imagining one's own and other's behavior. Brain Research, 1079, 4-14.
  • Decety, J., & Lamm, C. (2007). The role of the right temporoparietal junction in social interaction: How low-level computational processes contribute to meta-cognition. In: The Neuroscientist , 13, 580-593.
  • Decety, J. (2005). Perspective taking as the royal avenue to empathy. In BF Malle, & SD Hodges (Eds.), Other Minds: How Humans Bridge the Divide between Self and Others, (pp. 135-149). New York: Guilford Publishers.

Published books

  • The Moral Brain - A Multidisciplinary Perspective (2015). J. Decety and T. Wheatley (Eds.). Cambridge: MIT Press, Cambridge.
  • New Frontiers in Social Neuroscience (2014). J. Decety and Y. Christians (Eds.). New York: Springer.
  • Empathy - From Bench to Bedside (2012). J. Decety (Ed.). Cambridge: MIT Press, Cambridge.
  • The Oxford Handbook of Social Neuroscience (2011). J. Decety and JT Cacioppo (Ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
  • The Social Neuroscience of Empathy (2009). J. Decety and W. Ickes (Eds.). Cambridge: MIT Press, Cambridge.
  • Interpersonal Sensitivity: Entering Others' Worlds (2007). J. Decety and CD Batson (Eds.). Hove: Psychology Press.
  • Perception and Action: Recent Advances in Cognitive Neuropsychology (1998). J. Decety (Ed.). Hove, UK: Psychology Press.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Decety, J. et al. (1993).
  2. ↑ Decety, J. et al. (1997). Brain activity during observation of actions. Influence of action content and subject's strategy. Brain, 120, 1763-1777.
  3. ↑ Ruby, P., & Decety, J. (2001). Effect of the subjective perspective taking during simulation of action: a PET investigation of agency. Nature Neuroscience , 4, 546-550.
  4. ↑ Hommel, B., Müsseler, Aschersleben, G. and Prinz, W. (2001). The theory of event coding (TEC): A framework for perception and action planning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24, 849-937.
  5. ^ Decety, J., & Sommerville, JA (2003). Shared representations between self and others: A social cognitive neuroscience view. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 527-533.
  6. ↑ Jackson, PL, & Decety, J. (2004). Motor cognition: A new paradigm to investigate social interactions. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 14, 1-5.
  7. ↑ Sommerville, JA, & Decety, J. (2006). Weaving the fabric of social interaction: Articulating developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience in the domain of motor cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 13, 179-200.
  8. ↑ Decety, J. et al. (2008). "Who caused the pain? A functional MRI investigation of empathy and intentionality in children." Neuropsychologia, 46, 2607-2614.
  9. ↑ a b Decety, J., & Moriguchi, Y. (2007). The empathic brain and its dysfunction in psychiatric populations: implications for intervention across different clinical conditions. BioPsychoSocial Medicine, 1, 22-65.
  10. ↑ Decety, J., Michalska, KJ, Akitsuki, Y., & Lahey, B. (2008). Atypical empathic responses in adolescents with aggressive conduct disorder: a functional MRI investigation. Biological Psychology, Epub ahead of print.
  11. ^ Decety, J., & Meyer, M. (2008). From emotion resonance to empathic understanding: A social developmental neuroscience account. Development and Psychopathology, 20, 1053-1080.
  12. ^ Hoffman, M. (2000). Empathy and moral development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  13. ↑ Jackson, PL, Rainville, P., & Decety, J. (2006). To what extent do we share the pain of others? Insight from the neural bases of pain empathy. Pain, 125, 5-9.
  14. ^ Decety, J. (2007). A social cognitive neuroscience model of human empathy. In E. Harmon-Jones & P. ​​Winkielman (Eds.), Social Neuroscience: Integrating Biological and Psychological Explanations of Social Behavior (pp. 246-270). New York: Guilford Publications.
  15. ↑ Cheng, Y., Lin, C., Liu, HL, Hsu, Y., Lim, K., Hung, D., & Decety, J. (2007). Expertise modulates the perception of pain in others. Current Biology, 17, 1708-1713.
  16. ↑ Jackson, PL, Brunet, E., Meltzoff, AN, & Decety, J. (2006). Empathy examined through the neural mechanisms involved in imagining how I feel versus how you feel pain: An event-related fMRI study. Neuropsychologia, 44, 752-61.
  17. ↑ Cheng, Y., Yang, CY, Lin, CP, Lee, PR, & Decety, J. (2008). The perception of pain in others suppresses somatosensory oscillations: a magnetoencephalography study. NeuroImage, 40, 1833-1840.
  18. ↑ Jackson, PL, Meltzoff, AN, & Decety, J. (2005). How do we perceive the pain of others: A window into the neural processes involved in empathy. NeuroImage, 24, 771-779.
  19. ^ Lamm, C., Nusbaum, HC, Meltzoff, AN, & Decety, J. (2007). What are you feeling? Using functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess the modulation of sensory and affective responses during empathy for pain. PLoS ONE, 12, e1292.
personal data
SURNAME Decety, Jean
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French-American neuroscientist
DATE OF BIRTH 1960