Erbeck et al. On the other hand,higher degree of testosterone (either baseline level or immediately after external administration) has been connected with impairments in empathic behavior and reduced negative social emotions and is associated with utilitarian moral judgments for personal moral dilemmas (Carney and Mason Montoya et al. That is in all probability for the reason that hightestosterone people are significantly less sensitive for the emotionally salient nature of physical harm (Carney and Mason. Provided this overwhelming evidence for the role of lowered empathy in creating utilitarian moral judgments,it is of worth to study populations which have known empathy deficits to see if they show enhanced predisposition toward utilitarianism. 1 such population is alexithymia to which we turn next.ALEXITHYMIA AND EMPATHY DEFICITSAlexithymia,or “no words for feeling,” is a dimensional personality construct which is characterized by reduced capacity to experience feelings,absence of tendency to reflect on one’s personal emotions,difficulty in identifying feelings and bodily sensations connected with emotional arousal,and describing these feelings to other folks (Nemiah et al,e.g individuals with alexithymia could be aware that they’re experiencing an emotion,but will be unable to pinpoint when the emotion is anger,sadness,or disgust. Given the critical part of emotion in successful social behavior like perception and evaluation of socioemotional stimuli and regulation and modulation of social behavior based on such evaluations,alexithymic population performs poorly on a variety of social cognition PubMed ID:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27061721 tasks,e.g empathy,emotion recognition,emotional interoception,etc. (Wingberm le et al. Bird and Cook. Of interest towards the existing study are troubles linked with empathy in alexithymic personalities. Empathy is composed of two separate and equally vital components: (i) cognitive empathy requires understanding others’ emotional states by forming abstract mental representations of those states though maintaining selfother distinction; (ii) affective empathy includes experiencing these emotional states (de Vignemont and Singer. In other words,affective empathy entails that we share the isomorphic affective state on the target (“I endure,simply because you suffer”),even though cognitive empathy includes merely representing these affective states devoid of necessarily experiencing them (“From my observation of one’s behavior,I infer that you are suffering”). Recent function in social neuroscience supports the shared network model of empathywhich posits that exactly the same brain regions which can be involved in mapping body’s physiological states that inform of us of our subjective feelings states are also involved when we try to predict the feeling states of others (Decety and Sommerville Singer and Lamm for metaanalytic evidence,see Lamm et al. In other words,when persons try to understand emotional states of other people and encounter these states vicariously,they’re guided by their own internally generated affective states (Hooker et al. But this incredibly ability to recognize and describe feelings and interocepting on one’s feelings is compromised in alexithymia (e.g Silani et al. Simply because get Somatostatin-14 awareness of emotional states in the self is often a prerequisite to recognizing such states in others,decreased capacity in alexithymia to recognize and attend to one’s personal affective state is anticipated to lead to impairment in empathizing with other people. Indeed,higher degree of alexithymia is linked with lowered activity within the empathy circuits when they em.
