Bhismadev Chakrabarti & Edwin Rutsch: How to Build a Culture of Empathy with Science

 Bhismadev Chakrabarti heads a research group at the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics at the University of Reading, UK. The group studies emotion perception, empathy, and autism using functional MRI, eye gaze tracking, and psychophysiology. He works in collaboration with the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. Bhisma shared his insights into the physical nature of empathy and how we can build a culture of empathy.

"Empathy is the lens through which we view emotions in others. The highly empathic can sense others' emotions automatically, while those with lower empathy are often marked by a deficit in picking up socio-emotional cues from other people. Empathy exists in a continuum across the population, and our research here targets the following questions:
a) how does empathy influence the perception of emotions in others and in ourselves?
b) what are the neural and behavioral processes underlying empathy?"
Sub Conference: Science