Understanding individual variation in empathy enhancement

在我们的日常社会交往中，观察他人的经验（例如情绪，感觉）可以引发我们自己的类似体验。当我们感受到的体验与我们互动的人相匹配时（例如，因为你看到你的朋友悲伤而感到悲伤），我们被认为是同情他们。建立对我们如何同情他人的科学理解是非常重要的，因为同情在支持对健康和福祉至关重要的社会关系方面起着关键作用。我们现在知道，我们以各种不同的方式同情他人。最近的研究结果（包括我们自己的）表明，我们在精神上区分和关注自己和他人的经历的能力-我们的“自我-他人控制”-在参与心理系统中发挥着关键作用，使我们能够体验同理心。此外，我们已经证明，使用行为训练可以改善自我-他人控制，并且通过这样做，我们可以增强与他人共情的能力。这些发现表明，自我-他人控制调节可能是一个有前途的工具，以支持共情技能，这提供了潜在的发展干预方法，在团体中，提高共情将是有用的（例如，在医疗保健行业或具有改变的同理心的群体中，包括自闭症谱系障碍（ASD），述情障碍，精神病，关于我们的自我-他人控制如何调节我们与他人的共情能力，仍然有许多悬而未决的问题，在这一知识被广泛应用之前，必须解决这些问题。我们研究的主要目的是回答其中的一些问题。特别是：我们能否通过训练个体的自我-他人控制能力来提高他们在一系列同理心测量（包括问卷调查和行为测试）中的表现？某些类型的人会比其他人更容易受到移情增强程序的影响吗？与非临床人群相比，共情增强程序在临床人群中有效吗？增强同理心如何影响大脑？我们能刺激大脑的某些部分来增强同理心吗？我们的主要工作假设是，提高个人的自我他人控制，使用行为训练技术，将提高他们的表现在同理心测试。第二，我们认为，这种训练的目标可能会使某些类型的人比其他人受益更多，这取决于他们与社会能力相关的心理特征水平，以及他们是否患有临床疾病。我们将整合一系列方法来解决我们的目标和假设：个体的同理心将在自我-他人控制训练之前和之后进行测试，使用各种已建立的和新颖的同理心测试，包括心理测量，脑成像和脑刺激调查。我们不会将分析局限于一个群体，而是通过测试具有广泛移情反应的人来改变最先进的技术，包括典型的成年人，ASD，述情障碍和镜像感觉通感。这将扩大我们工作的影响，为各种群体的自我-他人控制和共情之间的关系提供见解。在这样做的过程中，我们将有助于告知我们对同理心的理解，澄清自我-他人控制的重要性，并为未来致力于开发治疗和培训计划以增强同理心的研究提供初始构建模块。

During our daily social interactions, observing others' experiences (e.g. emotion, sensation) can induce a similar experience of our own. When the experience we feel matches that of the person we are interacting with (e.g. feeling sad because you see your friend is sad), we are said to be empathising with them. Building a scientific understanding of how we empathise with others is extremely important as empathy plays a key role in supporting social relationships that are important for health and well-being. We now know that we empathise with others in a variety of different ways. Results of recent research (including our own) have shown that our ability to mentally distinguish between and focus on the experiences of ourselves and others - our 'self-other control' - plays a key role in engaging the psychological systems that allow us to experience empathy. Moreover, we have shown that it is possible to improve self-other control using behavioural training, and that in doing so we can enhance the ability to empathise with others. These findings indicate that self-other control modulation may be a promising tool to support empathy skills, which offers the potential for developing intervention approaches in groups where improving empathy would be useful (e.g. in healthcare professions or in groups with altered empathy including Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), alexithymia, psychopathy, mirror-sensory synaesthesia).There are still many open questions regarding how our self-other control mediates our ability to empathise with others, which must be addressed before this knowledge can be used widely. The primary aims of our research focus on answering some of these questions. In particular: Can we train individuals' self-other control to enhance their performance across a range of empathy measures (including questionnaires and behavioural tests)? Will certain types of individuals be more susceptible to empathy-enhancement procedures than others? Are empathy enhancement procedures effective in clinical, compared to non-clinical, populations? How does boosting empathy affect the brain? Can we stimulate certain parts of the brain to boost empathy?Our primary working hypothesis is that improving individuals' self-other control, using behavioural training techniques, will enhance their performance in empathy tests. Second, we believe that the target of this training may benefit certain kinds of individuals more than others, depending on their levels of psychological traits related to social ability, and whether they suffer from a clinical condition. We will integrate a range of methods to address our aims and hypotheses: individuals' empathy will be tested before and after self-other control training using a variety of established, and novel, empathy tests including psychometric, brain imaging, and brain stimulation investigations. Rather than restricting our analysis to one group, we will shift the state-of-the-art by testing people with a wide spectrum of empathic reactions including typical adults, ASD, alexithymia, and mirror-sensory synaesthesia. This will broaden the implications of our work to provide insights on the relationship between self-other control and empathy across a variety of groups. In doing so, we will help to inform our understanding of empathy, clarifying the importance of self-other control, and provide the initial building blocks for future research aspiring to develop treatments and training programs to enhance it.