Jean Decety
Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory
University of Chicago
5801 S. University Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60637
U.S.A.
Home Page
Phone: (773) 834-3711
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I was born and raised in France and attended the University Claude Bernard in Lyon as an undergraduate. Then I went to graduate school in neurobiology and cognitive neuroscience at the same University, where my advisor was Marc Jeannerod. I received my Ph.D. in 1989 (neuroscience). After that I completed a three-year postdoctoral fellowship in Sweden, at Lund University Hospital in clinical neurophysiology, with David Ingvar, and at the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm with Per Roland in the Department of clinical neurophysiology and neuroradiology. In 1991 I got a research position at the Medical Research and Health Institute (INSERM) in Lyon where I conducted neuroimaging research in cognitive neuroscience (with positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance). In 2001, I was offered the opportunity to be the director of a new cognitive and social neuroscience Lab at the Institute for Brain and Learning at the University of Washington (Seattle), where I collaborated with developmental psychologist Andrew Meltzoff. In 2006, I joined the University of Chicago as a Professor.
My lines of research focus on the questions, "How do we understand each other? Why and how do we care about others? If we put ourselves into the mental shoes of another person, how closely do we really feel what she feels? What cognitive and neural mechanisms account for a sense of self and other?" My research seeks to address these aspects of social cognition through the interdisciplinary approach that characterizes social neuroscience. In particular, I am interested two aspects of interpersonal sensitivity: 1) emotional resonance, and 2) the capacity to engage in role taking that have been theoretically linked to the development of empathy, moral reasoning and more generally prosocial behavior.
Research in my laboratory at the University of Chicago combines functional MRI (fMRI), event-related potentials (ERPs), autonomic nervous system measures (e.g., heart-rate variability, skin conductance) with dispositional and behavioral measures of empathy, personal distress, and empathic concern, and demonstrates that when individuals are asked to imagine how they would feel in reaction to emotion-laden familiar situations, including painful events, and to imagine how another person would feel if she was experiencing the same situations, common neural circuits are activated both for the self and the other. Such a sharing mechanism between self and other offers an interesting foundation for intersubjectivity because it provides a functional bridge between first-person information and third person information, grounded on self-other equivalence (Decety & Sommerville, 2003), which allows analogical reasoning, and offers a possible route to understanding others. However, imagining the other results in additional specific activation of parts of the frontal cortex that are implicated in executive control, as well as in the right inferior parietal cortex, a region that plays a pivotal role in the sense of agency. We hypothesized that the prefrontal cortex contributes in holding separate perspectives or in resisting interference from one’s own perspective (Decety & Jackson, 2004). Further, executive control is necessary to inhibit distress experienced by the self and allow for the full, though detached consideration of the other's situation.
New project in the Lab investigates the biopsychological processes that give rise to antisocial personality disorders in children and adults.
 Journal Articles:
 Cheng, Y., Lin, C., Liu, H. L., Hung, D., & Decety, J. (2007). Expertise modulates the perception of pain in others. Current Biology, 17, 1708-1713.
- Cheng, Y., Meltzoff, A. N., & Decety, J. (2007). Motivation modulates the activity of the human mirror system. Cerebral Cortex, 17, 1979-1986.
- Decety, J., & Batson, C. D. (2007). Social neuroscience approaches to interpersonal sensitivity. Social Neuroscience, 2(3-4), 151-157.
- Decety, J., & Lamm, C. (2007). The role of the right temporoparietal junction in social interaction: How low-level computational processes contribute to meta-cognition. The Neuroscientist, 13, 580-593.
- Decety, J., & Lamm, C. (2006). Human empathy through the lens of social neuroscience. The Scientific World Journal, 6, 1146-1163.
- Decety, J., & Moriguchi, Y. (2007). The empathic brain and its dysfunction in psychiatric populations: Implications for intervention across different clinical conditions. BioPsychoSocial Medicine, 1, 22-65.
- Jackson, P. L., Brunet, E., Meltzoff, A. N., & Decety, J. (2006). Empathy examined through the neural mechanisms involved in imagining how I feel versus how you feel pain: An event-related fMRI study. Neuropsychologia, 44, 752-61.
- Lamm, C., Batson, C. D., & Decety, J. (2007). The neural substrate of human empathy: Effects of perspective-taking and cognitive appraisal. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 42-58.
Other Publications:
- Decety, J. (2007). A social cognitive neuroscience model of human empathy. In E. Harmon-Jones & P. Winkielman (Eds.), Social Neuroscience: Integrating Biological and Psychological Explanations of Social Behavior (pp. 246-270). New York: Guilford Publications.
- Decety, J. (2005). Perspective taking as the royal avenue to empathy. In B. F. Malle & S. D. Hodges (Eds.), Other Minds: How Humans Bridge the Divide between Self and Others, (pp. 135-149). New York: Guilford Publishers.
- Decety, J., & Hodges, S. D. (2006). A social cognitive neuroscience model of human empathy. In P. A. M. van Lange (Ed.), Bridging Social Psychology: Benefits of Transdisciplinary Approaches (pp. 103-109). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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