Decety and Empathy

The article I read from Dr. Decety focused on empathy.  Decety covered several key concepts in the article, such as altruism and emotional contagion.  Altruism refers to prosocial behaviors that benefit the recipient at a cost to the donor.  Emotional contagion is an automatic response resulting in similar emotion being aroused in the observer as a direct result of perceiving the expressed emotion of another.    The article addressed that empathy is evolutionary and developmental.  Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.  It can range from feelings of concern for other people to knowing what another person may think or feel.  When the evolutionary perspective was addressed, Decety points out that empathy has promoted the human race since humans consider themselves to be social creatures. Anatomically, empathy has roots in ancient brain systems such as the ventral straitum, amygdala, and somatosensory cortex. It is from complex interactions that bring rise to empathetic behaviors, not simply one region of the brain.

Empathy and altruism are topics that are currently being discussed in a few of my classes.  Due to this, I find any information on it to be an interesting viewpoint.  What caught my attention in the article is that Decety claims empathy is extremely important to human behavior and survival as opposed to an altruistic act.  I find this to be extremely interesting because I had not considered the possibility that empathy is more important than most people realize. This has opened my eyes to the fact that there are countless possibilities as to why empathy is important in society.