Man or Monkey? Empathy predicts species category boundary judgements
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1
Southern Cross University, Psychology, Australia
Empathic capacity – the extent to which an individual responds vicariously to the emotional status of non-self agents – relates to perceived similarity. Specifically, stronger empathic responses are associated with higher levels of perceived similarity (Gallese 2001). In line with this, we tested whether empathy and performance on a vision-based category boundary task are related. Participants judged species membership (or not) of individual images taken from a human/monkey continuum (Sigala et al 2011). They then completed an empathy scale. Data show that for female participants, empathic capacity predicted performance on the perceptual task. In particular, high empathy women accepted images with low levels of target signal as belonging to the species of interest. Implications of this first demonstration of a systematic relationship between empathic capacity and vision-based category boundary judgements are discussed.
References
Gallese V. The 'Shared Manifold' Hypothesis: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8(5-7), 33-50.
Sigala R., Logothetis N.K. & Rainer G. (2011) Own-species bias in the representations of monkey and human face categories
in the primate temporal lobe, Journal of Neurophysiology, 105, 2749-2752.
Keywords:
Empathy,
category,
Visual Perception,
Social Behavior,
judgement
Conference:
ACNS-2013 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference, Clayton, Melbourne, Australia, 28 Nov - 1 Dec, 2013.
Presentation Type:
Poster
Topic:
Emotion and Social
Citation:
Brooks
A and
Doring
N
(2013). Man or Monkey? Empathy predicts species category boundary judgements.
Conference Abstract:
ACNS-2013 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2013.212.00098
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Received:
25 Sep 2013;
Published Online:
25 Nov 2013.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Anna Brooks, Southern Cross University, Psychology, Coffs Harbour, NSW, 2450, Australia, anna.brooks@scu.edu.au