Jean Decety
Biographic Data
| ID | 1541515 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jean Decety |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jean |
| FAMILY NAME | Decety |
| SIGNATURE | DECETY J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6165-9891 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 86 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Who would you save? Children and mothers' life-or-death decisions
The value of empathy in medical practice
The cross-cultural temporal neurodynamics of fairness
A sense of fairness is deeply rooted in human nature, and plays a fundamental role in supporting cooperation. This study investigated the electrophysiological responses to third-party resource allocations and behavioral economics games assessing costly sharing and distributive justice decisions in early and middle childhood across three countries, France, Taiwan, and the United States. To examine the temporal dynamics and cultural differences in …
More support, less distress? ”
This study explores how providing assisted dying services affects the psychological distress of practitioners. It investigates the influence of professional norms that endorse such services within their field. Study 1 included veterinarians ( N = 137, 75.2% female, M age = 43.1 years, SD age = 12.7 years), and Study 2 health practitioner students ( N = 386, 71.0% female, M age = 21.0 years, SD age = 14.4 years). In both studies, participants indi…
Using Latent Profile Analysis to Understand Health Practitioners’ Attitudes Toward Voluntary Assisted Dying
Prior work has documented considerable diversity among health practitioners regarding their support for voluntary assisted dying (VAD). We examined whether their attitudes are characterised by different combinations of personal support, normative support by other health practitioners, and whether they are predisposed to vicariously experience others' emotions (i.e., empathy). We also examined whether these profiles experienced different mental he…
Les apports et les limites de l’empathie dans la décision morale
L’empathie joue un rôle fondamental dans la motivation à vouloir le bien-être des autres. Cependant, elle a des coûts cognitifs, émotionnels et énergétiques. Elle est limitée et fragile. Cet article intègre des connaissances en provenance de la théorie de l’évolution, des neurosciences, de la psychologie et de l’économie comportementale pour démontrer pourquoi et comment l’empathie est non-consciemment et rapidement modulée par divers signaux soc…
Using Bayesian Networks to Investigate Psychological Constructs
Network analysis is an emerging field for the study of psychopathology that considers constructs as arising from the interactions among their constituents. Pairwise effects among psychological components are often investigated by using this framework. Few studies have applied Bayesian networks, models that include directed interactions to perform causal inference on psychological constructs. Directed graphical models may be less straightforward t…
Do the means affect the ends? Radical tactics influence motivation and action tendencies via the perceived legitimacy and efficacy of those actions
Identity, injustice and group efficacy are key motivations for collective action engagement. However, little work has examined factors that influence their emergence. Across three studies (total N = 938), we test whether exposure to different actions (i.e., radical or conventional) and the perceived legitimacy and efficacy of those actions (‘the means’) predict observers’ sense of injustice, identity, group efficacy about the issue, and in turn, …
Are empathic processes mechanisms of pregnancy's protective effect on smoking? Identification of a novel target for preventive intervention
The emergence of empathy
The social neuroscience of music
During the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen that people can adapt quickly to ensure that their social needs are met after being forced to isolate and socially distance. Many individuals turned immediately to music, as evidenced by people singing from balconies, watching live concerts on social media, and group singing online. In this article, we show how these musical adaptations can be understood through the latest advances in the social neurosci…
Increases in loneliness during medical school are associated with increases in individuals’ likelihood of mislabeling emotions as negative
Expressions of emotion represent an important and unique source of information about the states of others. Being able to effectively understand expressions of emotions to make inferences about others' internal mental states and use these inferences to guide decision-making and behavior is critical to navigating social relationships. Loneliness, the perception that one lacks social connection, has important functional consequences for how individu…
Third-party punishment following observed social rejection
Humans routinely punish others for violating social norms. This behavior is referred to as third-party punishment. Much of the research on this topic has been done in the context of group cooperation and unjust economic interactions. However, little is known about punishment in response to other types of more personal transgressions. In the present study, we sought to determine whether adults would punish an individual after viewing them undeserv…
Vegetarian, vegan, activist, radical
There are many different ways that people can express their support for the animals that exist in factory farms. This study draws on insights from the social identity approach, and adopts novel methods (latent profile analysis [LPA]) to examine the qualitatively different subgroups or profiles that comprise broader community positions on this issue. North American participants ( N = 578) completed measures of the frequency with which they engaged…
That’s not fair
The ability to distinguish between mere equality in resource distributions and fairness based on a broader range of contextual factors is of paramount importance in social decision making and is a critical component of morality. Children's developmental shift from viewing inequality as a dichotomous moral issue toward a more nuanced understanding of partial inequality has been well documented across middle childhood and is attributed to a host of…
How empathic are war veterans? An examination of the psychological impacts of combat exposure
How empathic are battle-experienced war veterans and demobilized ex-combatants? Individuals who have participated in war-related violence tend to show an increased risk of mental health problems, which makes their readaptation to postconflict civilian lif
Empathy and motivation for justice
Why do people tend to care for upholding principles of justice? This study examined the association between individual differences in the affective, motivational and cognitive components of empathy, sensitivity to justice, and psychopathy in participants (N 265) who were also asked to rate the permissibility of everyday moral situations that pit personal benefit against moral standards of justice. Counter to common sense, emotional empathy was no…
Empathy as a driver of prosocial behaviour
Empathy reflects the natural ability to perceive and be sensitive to the emotional states of others, coupled with a motivation to care for their well-being. It has evolved in the context of parental care for offspring, as well as within kinship bonds, to help facilitate group living. In this paper, we integrate the perspectives of evolution, animal behaviour, developmental psychology, and social and clinical neuroscience to elucidate our understa…
Le sens moral chez le bébé
Les fondements et prédispositions de la morale s’observent très tôt au cours du développement ontogénétique témoignant qu’elles sont sculptées dans notre génome. Les études réalisées avec des bébés indiquent qu’ils sont dotés dès la première année d’un système évaluatif qui permet de distinguer les interactions sociales positives des interactions sociales négatives ce qui encourage une prosocialité sélective et des comportements d’approche affili…
The Moral Brain
An overview of the latest interdisciplinary research on human morality, capturing moral sensibility as a sophisticated integration of cognitive, emotional, and motivational mechanisms. Over the past decade, an explosion of empirical research in a variety of fields has allowed us to understand human moral sensibility as a sophisticated integration of cognitive, emotional, and motivational mechanisms shaped through evolution, development, and cultu…
Empathy
Moral Brain
Friends or Foes
In the past decade, a flurry of empirical and theoretical research on morality and empathy has taken place, and interest and usage in the media and the public arena have increased. At times, in both popular culture and academia, morality and empathy are used interchangeably, and quite often the latter is considered to play a foundational role for the former. In this article, we argue that although there is a relationship between morality and empa…
The complex relation between morality and empathy
Empathy and helping
Previous research suggests that (a) racial group membership attenuates empathy, and subsequent prosocial helping behaviour, towards out-group members, and (b) helping behaviour is modified by the potential helper’s pool of cognitive resources. It remains unclear, however, how cognitive load influences empathy and helping towards racial in- versus out-group members. We investigated this question using a sample of 30 White females. After completing…
A Social-Neuroscience Perspective on Empathy
In recent years, abundant evidence from behavioral and cognitive studies and functional-imaging experiments has indicated that individuals come to understand the emotional and affective states expressed by others with the help of the neural architecture that produces such states in themselves. Such a mechanism gives rise to shared representations, which constitutes one important aspect of empathy, although not the sole one. We suggest that other …
Neuroanatomical Correlates of Visually Evoked Sexual Arousal in Human Males
Vegetarian, vegan, activist, radical
There are many different ways that people can express their support for the animals that exist in factory farms. This study draws on insights from the social identity approach, and adopts novel methods (latent profile analysis [LPA]) to examine the qualitatively different subgroups or profiles that comprise broader community positions on this issue. North American participants ( N = 578) completed measures of the frequency with which they engaged…
Do the means affect the ends? Radical tactics influence motivation and action tendencies via the perceived legitimacy and efficacy of those actions
Identity, injustice and group efficacy are key motivations for collective action engagement. However, little work has examined factors that influence their emergence. Across three studies (total N = 938), we test whether exposure to different actions (i.e., radical or conventional) and the perceived legitimacy and efficacy of those actions (‘the means’) predict observers’ sense of injustice, identity, group efficacy about the issue, and in turn, …
That’s not fair
The ability to distinguish between mere equality in resource distributions and fairness based on a broader range of contextual factors is of paramount importance in social decision making and is a critical component of morality. Children's developmental shift from viewing inequality as a dichotomous moral issue toward a more nuanced understanding of partial inequality has been well documented across middle childhood and is attributed to a host of…
The social neuroscience of music
During the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen that people can adapt quickly to ensure that their social needs are met after being forced to isolate and socially distance. Many individuals turned immediately to music, as evidenced by people singing from balconies, watching live concerts on social media, and group singing online. In this article, we show how these musical adaptations can be understood through the latest advances in the social neurosci…
Neuroanatomical Correlates of Visually Evoked Sexual Arousal in Human Males
Effect of subjective perspective taking during simulation of action
Shared representations between self and other
When the self represents the other
There is converging evidence from developmental and cognitive psychology, as well as from neuroscience, to suggest that the self is both special and social, and that self-other interaction is the driving force behind self-development. We review experimental findings which demonstrate that human infants are motivated for social interactions and suggest that the development of an awareness of other minds is rooted in the implicit notion that others…
The Functional Architecture of Human Empathy
Empathy accounts for the naturally occurring subjective experience of similarity between the feelings expressed by self and others without loosing sight of whose feelings belong to whom. Empathy involves not only the affective experience of the other person’s actual or inferred emotional state but also some minimal recognition and understanding of another’s emotional state. In light of multiple levels of analysis ranging from developmental psycho…
How do we perceive the pain of others? A window into the neural processes involved in empathy
Human Empathy Through the Lens of Social Neuroscience
Empathy is the ability to experience and understand what others feel without confusion between oneself and others. Knowing what someone else is feeling plays a fundamental role in interpersonal interactions. In this paper, we articulate evidence from social psychology and cognitive neuroscience, and argue that empathy involves both emotion sharing (bottom-up information processing) and executive control to regulate and modulate this experience (t…
The power of simulation
A Social-Neuroscience Perspective on Empathy
In recent years, abundant evidence from behavioral and cognitive studies and functional-imaging experiments has indicated that individuals come to understand the emotional and affective states expressed by others with the help of the neural architecture that produces such states in themselves. Such a mechanism gives rise to shared representations, which constitutes one important aspect of empathy, although not the sole one. We suggest that other …
The Neural Substrate of Human Empathy
Whether observation of distress in others leads to empathic concern and altruistic motivation, or to personal distress and egoistic motivation, seems to depend upon the capacity for self-other differentiation and cognitive appraisal. In this experiment, behavioral measures and event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging were used to investigate the effects of perspective-taking and cognitive appraisal while participants observed the facia…
The empathic brain and its dysfunction in psychiatric populations
Empathy is a concept central to psychiatry, psychotherapy and clinical psychology. The construct of empathy involves not only the affective experience of the other person's actual or inferred emotional state but also some minimal recognition and understanding of another's emotional state. It is proposed, in the light of multiple levels of analysis including social psychology, cognitive neuroscience and clinical neuropsychology, a model of empathy…
Le cerveau social, nouvel objet d'étude
Les neurosciences sociales se proposent d'explorer les fondements neurologiques des comportements sociaux comme l'attachement, l'empathie ou la cooperation. Elles le font dans une vision integrative ou mecanismes neuronaux et facteurs sociaux s'influencent reciproquement
The Social Neuroscience of Empathy
Cross-disciplinary, cutting-edge work on human empathy from the perspectives of social, cognitive, developmental and clinical psychology and cognitive/affective neuroscience. In recent decades, empathy research has blossomed into a vibrant and multidisciplinary field of study. The social neuroscience approach to the subject is premised on the idea that studying empathy at multiple levels (biological, cognitive, and social) will lead to a more com…
The Neurodevelopment of Empathy in Humans
Empathy, which implies a shared interpersonal experience, is implicated in many aspects of social cognition, notably prosocial behavior, morality and the regulation of aggression. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the current knowledge in developmental and affective neuroscience with an emphasis on the perception of pain in others. It will be argued that human empathy involves several components: affective arousal, emotion unders…
The Oxford Handbook of Social Neuroscience
The complexities of the brain and nervous system make neuroscience an inherently interdisciplinary pursuit, one that comprises disparate basic, clinical, and applied disciplines. Behavioral neuroscientists approach the brain and nervous system as instruments of sensation and response; cognitive neuroscientists view the same systems as a solitary computer with a focus on representations and processes. The Oxford Handbook of Social Neuroscience mar…
Group Processes
A great deal of behavior occurs in a social context. It has become obvious that social and environmental variables can have a profound influence on behavior, neurochemistry, physiology, and the effects of drugs. This chapter highlights one facet of social neuroscience—the effects of being dominant in social environments. It focuses on animal models, describing several important independent variables using both rodent and nonhuman primate models. …
Dissecting the Neural Mechanisms Mediating Empathy
Empathy is thought to play a key role in motivating prosocial behavior, guiding our preferences and behavioral responses, and providing the affective and motivational base for moral development. While these abilities have traditionally been examined using behavioral methods, recent work in evolutionary biology, developmental and cognitive neuroscience has begun to shed light on the neural circuitry that instantiate them. The purpose of this artic…
Meta-analytic evidence for common and distinct neural networks associated with directly experienced pain and empathy for pain
Pleasing frowns, disappointing smiles
The biological predisposition to resonate emotionally with another person is regarded as a critical aspect of social interaction. There are, however, situations in which the emotional response to others is discordant with their emotional experience. Using event-related potentials, the present study investigated the neural underpinnings of this phenomenon, termed "counterempathy." Participants played a card game under the belief that they were pla…
Putting together phylogenetic and ontogenetic perspectives on empathy
Empathy in Clinical Practice
To better understand clinical empathy and what factors can undermine its experience and outcome in care-giving settings, a large-scale study was conducted with 7,584 board certified practicing physicians. Online validated instruments assessing different aspects of empathy, distress, burnout, altruistic behavior, emotional awareness, and well-being were used. Compassion satisfaction was strongly associated with empathic concern, perspective taking…
Neural Correlates of Deficits in Pain-Related Affective Meaning Construction in Patients With Chronic Pain Disorder
OBJECTIVE: Psychological and neural mechanisms of the affective dimension of pain are known to be disturbed in patients with chronic pain disorder. The aim of this functional magnetic resonance imaging study was to assess the neurofunctional and behavioral measures underlying the ability to construct pain-related affective meaning in a painful situation by comparing 21 clinically and psychometrically well-characterized patients with persistent no…
Friends or Foes
In the past decade, a flurry of empirical and theoretical research on morality and empathy has taken place, and interest and usage in the media and the public arena have increased. At times, in both popular culture and academia, morality and empathy are used interchangeably, and quite often the latter is considered to play a foundational role for the former. In this article, we argue that although there is a relationship between morality and empa…
The complex relation between morality and empathy
Empathy and helping
Previous research suggests that (a) racial group membership attenuates empathy, and subsequent prosocial helping behaviour, towards out-group members, and (b) helping behaviour is modified by the potential helper’s pool of cognitive resources. It remains unclear, however, how cognitive load influences empathy and helping towards racial in- versus out-group members. We investigated this question using a sample of 30 White females. After completing…
Psychology (41 works) · Social Psychology (28 works) · Cognition (23 works) · Empathy (22 works) · Cognitive psychology (21 works) · Neuroscience (21 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (16 works) · Social cognition (12 works) · Developmental psychology (11 works) · Action Observation and Synchronization (10 works)