Dr. Jean Decety is Irving B. Harris Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Chicago. He is the co-director of the Brain Research Imaging Center at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Jean Decety is the Editor of Social Neuroscience.

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 the neuroscience program at the same University. 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 worked in the domains of cognitive neuroscience of action perception and understanding, mental imagery, imitation, perspective taking and theory of mind using positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging, as well as measurements of the autonomic nervous system.

In 2001, I was offered by Pat Kuhl and Andrew Meltzoff the opportunity to become the head of a new cognitive and social neuroscience Lab at he University of Washington Institute for Brain and Learning in Seattle, where I conducted research on imitation, empathy and sympathy. In 2006, I joined the University of Chicago and the College as a Professor with appointments in psychology and psychiatry.

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? How do we regulate our emotions? What neurodevelopmental changes are associated with empathy and implicit moral reasoning in children and adolescents. My research seeks to address these aspects of social cognition and intersubjectivity through the interdisciplinary approach that characterizes social neuroscience.

Ongoing projects investigate how interpersonal sensitivity is modulated by various social factors such as stigma and racial biases, how empathy is regulated in physicians, what is the contribution of affective arousal in moral reasoning with a neurodevelopmental perspective. Current research also explores the neurological mechanisms that underpin the function and dysfunction of empathy and its expression in children and adults who vary in psychopathic traits, including incarcerated psychopaths and children with aggressive conduct disorder. All these projects involve functional MRI, structural and diffusion tensor imaging, gaze analysis and pupillometry, autonomic nervous system measurements, high-density EEG, and behavioral tasks.