Neuronal Correlates of Empathy

Dr. Meyza is assistant professor and an associate researcher in the Laboratory of Emotions Neurobiology at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Polish Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on the lack of empathy in mouse models of autism. Dr. Knapska has been the head of the Laboratory of Emotions Neurobiology at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Polish Academy of Sciences, since 2012. The group currently focuses on mechanisms of socially transferred emotions and cellular mechanisms of extinction and renewal of conditioned fear. Dr. Knapska’s lab uses experimental rodent models to study brain mechanisms underlying social communication and the neural mechanisms of impaired social behaviors.

1. Introduction– empathy beyond semantics 2. The Vicarious Brain: Integrating Empathy and Emotional Learning 3. The neural bases of empathy in humans 4. Vicarious activations: our current understanding of the neural correlates of human empathy, its limitations and how rodent neuroscience is critical for further progress 5. Ethological Approaches to Empathy in Primates 6. Mirror mechanism and embodied emotions 7. The Neurobiological Influence of Stress in the Vole Pair Bond 8. The Social Transmission of Associative Fear in Rodents – Individual Differences in Fear Conditioning by Proxy 9. Neuronal correlates of remote fear learning in rats 10. Feeling others' pain: Affective communication in rodent models 11. Relief provided by conspecifics: social buffering 12. Helping behavior in rats 13. Reconstructing empathy from the bottom-up with rodent models of shared affect 14. Lack of empathy – mouse models 15. Future directions in empathy studies