Keysers Groep

Have you ever felt your heart racing while watching a horror movie? Or felt sad when a character dies in a drama? 

If so, you have experienced the power of empathy: the ability to share and understand the emotions of others. But how does empathy work in the brain? Empathy can be very powerful, and can be used to do both something good or bad: we can help someone in need, or a psychopath can use empathy to manipulate women and switch it off when raping them. Most people will not go quite this far, but everyone can use empathy strategically, and only remember the emotional aspects of an experience when it benefits them.

Some scientists think we help others for selfish reasons, namely to rid ourselves of the pain we experience through our empathy: we help others because we suffer ourselves. Others say that we help others for moral reasons: we help because our cognition makes us. These two schools of thought have been battling it out for centuries. Understanding how people’s levels of empathy differ and how we regulate our empathic feelings lies at the core of our research.

Christian Keysers 

Christian Keysers’ lab seeks to discover the neural basis of empathy, by utilizing cutting-edge methods to measure and manipulate the activity of brain regions involved in feeling and observing emotions, sensations, and actions in both humans and rodents. 

Empathy is not unique to human beings: In our experiments we offer rats a choice to give themselves food through pressing one of two levers; one lever is very easy to operate, while the other is more of a challenge. Most rats prefer the easy option, unless it is associated with a distress call from another rat, then they stop using the easy lever and switch to the more difficult lever to help the other rat. 

When rats hear the stressed squeak of another rat, the same brain cells become active as when these rats themselves would be in pain. In human brains we see the same phenomenon: our brains are equipped with ‘shared circuits’ that activate both when we experience something ourselves and when we witness someone else having a similar experience.

Even though our brains are more complex than the brains of rats, we share the basis for empathy in the same brain area: the cingulate cortex. This brain region helps us to imagine what it would be like to be in the other person’s shoes, making us understand others not by rational thinking, but by intuitive feeling. Neuroscience makes it possible to penetrate into the minds of humans and animals, showing that empathy is a deep-rooted evolutionary propensity: If we block the brain activity in the cingulate area, the rats go back to using the easy lever.

For more insight into Christian’s latest research check out his recent publications. 

You can also connect with Christian on LinkedIn or BlueSky