Human experience depends formatively and constitutively on the dynamic coupling of self and other
in empathy. As an intentional
capacity, empathy is the basic ability to comprehend another individual’s experience, a capacity that underlies all the particular feelings and emotions
one can have for another. To exercise this capacity is to engage empathy as
an intentional act and intentional process
Thus, empathy is not simply the comprehension of another
person’s particular experiences (sadness, joy, and so on), but the experience of
another as a living bodily subject of experience like oneself
This phenomenological (consciousness) conception of the embodied basis of empathy can
be linked to cognitive science by going back to the broad notion of empathy as
process—as any process in which the attentive perception of the other generates a state in oneself more applicable to the other’s state than to one’s own
prior state. According to the “perception-action model” of empathy,14 when we
perceive another person’s behavior, our own motor representations for that
kind of behavior are automatically activated and generate associated autonomic
empathy and human experience and somatic responses (unless inhibited). For instance, it has been shown that
when one individual sees another execute actions with different body parts
(mouth actions, hand actions, and foot actions), the neural patterns of activation in the observer’s brain correspond to those that would be active were the
observer performing the same bodily actions This kind of self-other coupling can be called sensorimotor coupling. In
addition to sensorimotor coupling, there is affective coupling or “affective resonance.” In affective resonance, two individuals engaged in direct interaction
affect each other’s emotional states
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