For example, young children often engage in failures of perspective-taking (e.g., on false belief tasks) due to underdeveloped social cognitive abilities.
For example, behavioral economics research has described a number of failures in empathy that occur due to emotional influences on perspective-taking when people make social predictions.
For example, a great deal of research has demonstrated that people show reduced responses (e.g. neural activity) when observing outgroup (vs. ingroup) members in pain.
[21] Perhaps the most well-known "counter-empathic" emotion—i.e., an emotion that reflects an empathy gap for the target—is schadenfreude, or the experience of pleasure when observing or learning about another's suffering or misfortune.
Stress related to the experience of empathy may cause empathic distress fatigue and occupational burnout,[29] particularly among those in the medical profession.
In particular, scientists have sought to determine whether observed gender differences in empathy are due to variance in ability, motivation, or both between men and women.
[36] A 1983 review found a similar result, although differences in scores were stronger for self-report, as compared to observational, measures.
[41] However, more recent work has found little evidence that gender differences in self-reported empathy are related to neurophysiological measures (hemodynamic responses and pupil dilation).
The mirror neuron system[53] has been proposed as a neural mechanism supporting perception-action coupling and empathy, although such claims remain a subject of scientific debate.
Although the exact (if any) role of mirror neurons in supporting empathy is unclear, evidence suggests that neural simulation (i.e., recreating neural states associated with a process observed in another) may generally support a variety of psychological processes in humans, including disgust,[54] pain,[55] touch,[56] and facial expressions.
[57] Reduced neural simulation of responses to suffering may account in part for observed empathy gaps, particularly in an intergroup context.
This possibility is supported by research demonstrating that people show reduced neural activity when they witness ethnic outgroup (vs. ingroup) members in physical or emotional pain.
[59] However, in one study of Israelis and Palestinians, intranasal oxytocin administration improved opposing partisans' empathy for outgroup members by increasing the salience of their pain.
[69][70] In contrast, the meta-analysis referenced previously[35] found that anterior insula activation was more reliably related to social cognition about outgroup members.
Meta-analyses have identified two distinct subregions of the anterior insula: ventral AI, which is linked to emotional and visceral experiences (e.g. subjective arousal); and dorsal AI, which has been associated with exogenous attention processes such as attention orientation, salience detection, and task performance monitoring.
[35] Lateralization of function within the anterior insula may also help account for divergent results, due to differences in connectivity between left and right AI.
In contrast, the meta-analysis found left lateralization of anterior insula activity for thinking about ingroup compared to outgroup members.
This finding suggests that left anterior insula may help support perspective-taking and mentalizing about ingroup members, and thinking about them in an individuated way.
However, these possibilities are speculative and lateralization may vary due to characteristics such as age, gender, and other individual differences, which should be accounted for in future research.
[75][74] A number of fMRI studies have attempted to identify the neural activation patterns underlying the experience of intergroup schadenfreude, particularly toward outgroup members in pain.
However, training people in perspective-taking, for example by providing instructions about how to take an outgroup member's perspective, has been shown to increase intergroup helping and the recognition of group disparities.