Empathy means understanding another person’s emotional or intentional state by vicariously sharing this state. As opposed to emotional contagion, empathy is characterized by the self–other distinction of subjective experience. Empathy develops in the second year, as soon as symbolic representation and mental imagery set in that enable children to represent the self, to recognize their mirror image, and to identify with another person. In experiments with 126 children, mirror recognition and readiness to empathize with a distressed playmate were investigated. Almost (...) all recognizers showed compassion and tried to help, whereas nonrecognizers were perplexed or remained indifferent. Several motivational consequences of empathy are discussed and its special quality is outlined in comparison with theory of mind and perspective taking. (shrink)

Organisms engage in various activities that are directed at objects, whether real or imagined. Such activities may be termed “intentional relations.” We present a four-level framework of social understanding that organizes the ways in which social organisms represent the intentional relations of themselves and other agents. We presuppose that the information available to an organism about its own intentional relations (or first person information) is qualitatively different from the information available to that organism about other agents’ intentional relations (or third (...) person information). However, through the integration of these two sources of information, it is possible to generate representations of intentional relations that are uniformly applicable to the activities of both self and other. The four levels of the framework differ in the extent to which such integration occurs and in the degree to which imagination is involved in generating these representations. Most animals exist at the lowest level, at which integration of first and third person sources of information does not occur. Of nonhuman species, only great apes exhibit social understanding at intermediate levels, at which integration of these sources of information provides uniform representations of intentional relations. Only humans attain the highest level, at which it is possible to represent intentional relations with mental objects. We propose that with the development of the imagination, children progress through three stages, equivalent to the later three levels of the framework. The abnormalities in social understanding of autistic individuals are hypothesized to result from a failure to develop integrated representations of intentional relations. (shrink)