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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Dr. Jean Decety is the Irving B. Harris Professor at the University of Chicago and its College, with a primary appointment in the Department of Psychology and a secondary appointment in the Department of Psychiatry. He is the co-director of the Brain Research Imaging Center at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Decety is the Editor in Chief 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 I conducted research in cognitive neuroscience of action perception and understanding, mental imagery, imitation, 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 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 neural mechanisms underpin implicit moral reasoning?" My research seeks to address these aspects of social cognition and intersubjectivity through the interdisciplinary approach that characterizes social neuroscience. 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), and eye-tracking with dispositional and behavioral measures of empathy, personal distress, and empathic concern. Results demonstrates that when participants 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). In a series of functional MRI and magnetoencephalographic studies, we have shown that when we (children and adults) attend to other people in pain, the neural circuits underpinning the processing of first-hand experience of pain are activated in the observer (e.g., Lamm, Batson & Decety, 2007; Decety, Michalska & Akitsuki, 2008). This basic somatic sensorimotor resonance plays a critical role in the primitive building block of empathy and moral reasoning that relies on the sharing of other’s distress. Such results are important, because appreciating the brain’s role in responding to the pain of others can help us understand children who exhibit social cognitive disorders (e.g., antisocial personality disorder and conduct disorder) and are often deficient in experiencing empathic concern or guilt. Ongoing projects in the Lab investigate how interpersonal sensitivity is modulated by various social factors such as stigma and racial biases. 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, by combining functional magnetic resonance imaging, structural and diffusion tensor imaging, gaze analysis and pupillometry, autonomic nervous system measurements, and behavioral responses.
 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-neuron 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., & Meyer, M. (2008). From emotion resonance to empathic understanding: A social developmental neuroscience account. Development and Psychopathology, 20, 1053-1080.
- Decety, J., Michalska, K. J., & Akitsuki, Y. (2008). Who caused the pain? An fMRI investigation of empathy and intentionality in children. Neuropsychologia, 46, 2607-2614.
- Decety, J., Michalska, K. J., Akitsuki, Y., & Lahey, B. B. (2009). Atypical empathic responses in adolescents with aggressive conduct disorder: A functional MRI investigation. Biological Psychology, 80, 203-211.
- 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. 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.
- Decety, J., & Meyer, M. (2009). Imitation as a stepping stone to empathy. In M. de Hann & M. Gunnar (Eds.), The handbook of developmental social neuroscience (pp. 142-158). New York: Guilford Publications.
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