How Would You Feel versus How Do You Think She Would Feel? A Neuroimaging Study of Perspective-Taking with Social Emotions Perrine Ruby 1 and Jean Decety 2 Abstract & Perspective-taking is a complex cognitive process involved in social cognition. This positron emission tomography (PET) study investigated by means of a factorial design the interaction between the emotional and the perspective factors. Participants were asked to adopt either their own (first person) perspective or the (third person) perspective of their mothers in response to situations involving social emotions or to neutral situations. The main effect of third-person versus first- person perspective resulted in hemodynamic increase in the medial part of the superior frontal gyrus, the left superior temporal sulcus, the left temporal pole, the posterior cingulate gyrus, and the right inferior parietal lobe. A cluster in the postcentral gyrus was detected in the reverse comparison. The amygdala was selectively activated when subjects were processing social emotions, both related to self and other. Interaction effects were identified in the left temporal pole and in the right postcentral gyrus. These results support our prediction that the frontopolar, the somatosensory cortex, and the right inferior parietal lobe are crucial in the process of self/ other distinction. In addition, this study provides important building blocks in our understanding of social emotion processing and human empathy. & INTRODUCTION What does it mean to take another person’s perspective? If we put ourselves in someone else’s place, do we really feel what she feels? Does having a more accurate per- ception of another person’s state of mind make us more sympathetic to his plight? These questions are often addressed in social psychology using overlapping con- cepts like perspective taking and empathy. Adopting another person’s perspective involves more than simply focusing our attention on the other. It involves imagining how that person is affected by his or her situation without confusion between the feelings experienced by the self versus feelings experienced by the other person (Davis, 1996). A number of perspective-taking models in social psy- chology assert that the social construction of meaning derives from one’s own implicit theories about what the other knows, feels, thinks, and believes (Kraus & Fussell, 1996). Thus, understanding the states of mind of another person requires taking into account their perspective in visual, conceptual, and affective domains. Gilovich, Medvec, and Savitsky (2000) proposed the ‘‘anchoring (in the self-perspective) and adjustment hypothesis’’ to explain the egocentric bias when assessing another’s state of mind, as evidenced in numerous social psycho- logical studies (e.g., Nickerson, 1999; Fenigstein & Abrams, 1993; Markus, Moreland, & Smith, 1985). Such a hypothesis is similar to the simulation theory posited by developmental psychologists (e.g., Taylor, Esbensen, & Bennett, 1994; Harris, 1989) and philosophers of mind (e.g., Goldman, 1992; Gordon, 1986) to explain the human ability to read the other’s mind (theory of mind [ToM]). The simulation theory maintains that human beings are able to use the psychological resources re- sponsible for their own behavior to simulate the behavior of others by projecting themselves into the situation encountered by the other (and thus inferring the psy- chological causes of the other’s behavior), typically by making decisions within a ‘‘pretend’’ context. An inter- esting aspect to emphasize is that both hypotheses suggest a major influence of the self-perspective in the construction of the other’s perspective representation. Consistent with such a view, Vorauer and Ross (1999) have proposed that errors in assessing another’s per- spective are rooted in a failure to suppress one’s self. In cognitive neuroscience, the model of self-perspec- tive as the default mode of our mental functioning may account for the phenomenon that similar brain areas and computational processing have been involved during the execution of action, mental representation of one’s own action, and observation of another’s action (Grezes & Decety, 2001). These results also support the common coding model of perception and action. 1 Inserm, 2 University of Washington D 2004 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 16:6, pp. 988–999