The ability to perceive and process the infor- mation about the emotional states of others is considered a cornerstone of social sensibility and adaptation. Among the various forms of emotion- al connections with others, empathy has re- ceived lots of attention from philosophers and psychologists, and more recently from social neuroscientists. The construct of empathy de- notes, at a phenomenological level of description, a sense of similarity between the feelings one ex- periences and those expressed by others. It can be conceived of as an interaction between any two individuals, with one experiencing and shar- ing the feeling of the other. This sharing of feel- ings does not necessarily imply that one will act or even feel impelled to act in a supportive or sympathetic way (empathy’s paradox is that this ability may be used for both helpful and hurtful purposes). Moreover, the social and emotional sit- uations eliciting empathy can become quite com- plex depending on the feelings experienced by the observed and the relationship of the target to the observer (Feshbach, 1997). This capacity to understand others and experience their feel- ings in relation to oneself illustrates the social na- ture of the self, its inherent intersubjectivity. The goal of this paper is to propose a new model of empathy that articulates data from so- cial psychology and cognitive neuroscience (in- cluding neuropsychology). Bridging social psy- chology and cognitive neuroscience provides im- portant guidelines for investigating the neural processes underlying empathy. On the other hand, cognitive neuroscience may help disam- 2006 年 3 月 25 日 11 ■ Special Lecture Human empathy Jean Decety Abstract : The psychological construct of empathy refers to an emotional response that em- anates from the emotional state of another individual without loosing sight of whose feelings be- long to whom. This response is contingent on cognitive as well as emotional factors. Empathy involves not only the affective experience of the other person’s actual or inferred emotional state but also some minimal recognition and understanding of another’s emotional state. Draw- ing on cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychological data, I propose that empathy involves parallel and distributed processing in a number of dissociable computational mechanisms. Shared neural representations, self-awareness, mental flexibility and emotion regulation consti- tute the basic macro-components of empathy, which are underpinned by specific and interact- ing neural systems. Furthermore, this model of empathy is consistent with the view that social cognition draws on both domain-general mechanisms and domain-specific embodied represen- tations. Japanese Journal of Neuropsychology 22 ; 11-33, 2006 Key words ：social cognition, shared representations, emotion regulation, self-awareness, empathy, cognitive neuroscience ─ ─ 11 Prof. Jean Decety, Social Cognitive Neuroscience, The University of Chicago