Empathy and Juvenile Crime |
Mirror neurons are thought to be the neurobiological basis of empathy.
Empathy can be a powerful motivator.
Childhood trauma can interrupt the development of empathy.
Empathy, our capacity to feel the inner experience of another, underlies much of our behavior and the choices and decisions we make. It is a more powerful teacher than its cousins, sympathy and compassion, in which we feel deeply for rather than with another, because the feelings it generates are so strong.
The neuroscientific exploration of empathy has taught us that it involves multiple emotional and cognitive processes, some of which rely on ancient subcortical structures in the brain (Marsh, 2018). In the 1990s, studies of monkeys led to the discovery of “mirror neurons”—specialized cells that fire whether the monkey is itself performing an activity or simply observing another performing it. Thirty years of research strongly suggests that humans also have mirror neurons, and they may be the basis for empathic responses when we see another person’s emotion or action (Bonini, Rotunno et........