Listening to others´ emotions: neural representations of empathy arising from emotional voices

The capacity to empathize is crucial to social relationships.

Studies on empathy in relation to pain and emotional faces have referred to the “shared-neural-representations” hypothesis as an explanation for the neural basis of sharing sensations or emotions.

According to this hypothesis, we share others´ emotions by processing them (at least partially) using our own personal, neural representations.

Voice is one of the most important means of expressing and perceiving emotions but no studies have yet investigated whether the same hypothesis is relevant to explaining empathy arising from emotional voices.

This project aims at examining whether the “shared-neural-representations” hypothesis is relevant to empathy arising from emotional voices.

We will collect data simultaneously on neural activity in the brain (functional magnetic resonance imaging), physiological changes associated with emotional responses (galvanic skin response) and subjective experience of empathy in order to analyze common neural representations of both vocal expression of emotions and perception of the same emotions conveyed vocally by others.

The results will contribute to a better understanding of empathy and whether the ability to mirror others is facilitated by the putative mirror-neuron areas of the brain or whether it reflects a generalized neural-coding strategy.

The findings will also provide insights for computational models of human empathic behavior in the context of human-computer interaction.