Empathic Heart: An Interoceptive Predictive Processing Framework of Empathy

Human beings are inherently social. To understand others and their surrounding social world we use a wide range of complex processes that are broadly defined as social cognition. While many of these processes have been extensively studied, empathy is still one of the major mysteries of the social brain. Empathy can be broadly defined as the ability to recognize, understand, and share the thoughts and feelings of others. Nowadays, although the neuronal networks underlying empathy domains are fairly well-differentiated (perspective-taking vs. affective sharing), their underlying neurobiological mechanisms are still poorly understood. The Empathic Heart project will allow us to propose a new theoretical PP framework of empathy, highlighting the critical role of interoceptive processing. Producing this biologically well-established empathy model may provide critical insights to understand human behaviour and neurophysiology, opening the door for upcoming research in behavioural sciences and neuroscience.