The Developmental Origins of the Social Brain: Empathy, Morality, and Justice

Abstract

The social brain is the cornerstone that effectively negotiates and navigates complex social environments and relationships. When mature, these social abilities facilitate the interaction and cooperation with others. Empathy, morality, and justice, among others, are all closely intertwined, yet the relationships between them are quite complex. They are fundamental components of our human nature, and shape the landscape of our social lives. The various facets of empathy, including affective arousal/emotional sharing, empathic concern, and perspective taking, have unique contributions as subcomponents of morality. This review helps understand how basic forms of empathy, morality, and justice are substantialized in early ontogeny. It provides valuable information as to gain new insights into the underlying neurobiological precursors of the social brain, enabling future translation toward therapeutic and medical interventions.

When Implicit Prosociality Trumps Selfishness: The Neural Valuation System Underpins More Optimal Choices When Learning to Avoid Harm to Others Than to Oneself

“…Physical pain acts as a powerful learning signal, indicating the immediate need to adjust our behavior to avoid injury (Wiech and Tracey, 2013;Vlaeyen, 2015;Tabor and Burr, 2019). As social beings, we also have to learn and adapt our behavior to avoid harm to others, and "interpersonal harm aversion" has been proposed to form the basis of prosocial behavior and morality (Gray et al, 2012;Crockett, 2013;Chen et al, 2018;Decety and Cowell, 2018). However, it remains unknown if humans are as good at learning to avoid harm to others (prosocial learning) as they are at learning to avoid harm to themselves (self-relevant learning).…”

Aggression, Moral Disengagement and Empathy. A Longitudinal Study Within the Interpersonal Dynamics of Bullying

“…Thus, aggression in bullying, as mentioned above, predicts higher scores on moral disengagement (Obermann, 2013;Thornberg et al, 2019). Considering the relationship described by Bandura (2002) between morality and affective processes such as empathy, the studies coming from neuroscience describing the existence of a social brain where morality and empathy are interconnected (Detert et al, 2008;Chen et al, 2018) and the evidence from developmental and educational psychology that supports an inverse relationship between moral disengagement and affective and cognitive empathy (Haddock and Jimerson, 2017), it would be plausible to hypothesize that aggression may also affect these socioemotional and socio-cognitive skills in the medium term. Thus, mechanisms of moral disengagement, in addition to preventing individuals from feeling negative emotions when committing transgressions (Mazzone et al, 2019), may lead to a decrease in affective and cognitive empathy.…”

The clinical assessment of acts of violence: mental mechanisms and subjectivity

“…This type of inhibitory effect is attenuated if there is an impairment of the general capacity to readily perspective-take, such as in autism spectrum disorder (Chen 2018). In psychopathy, there is a more specific disturbance in relation to certain emotional states of others, such as fearfulness and disgust (Igoumenou 2017).…”