Lab website for Bhismadev Chakrabarti at the University of Reading, UK. The lab works on empathy, emotions, and autism and is located within the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics.
Empathy and Emotion
Empathy is the lens through which we view emotions in others. The highly empathic can sense others’ emotions automatically, while those with lower empathy (as well as people with Autism Spectrum Conditions) are often marked by a deficit in picking up socio-emotional cues from other people. Empathy exists in a continuum across the population, and our research here targets the following questions:
a) how does empathy influence the perception of emotions in others and in ourselves?
b) what are the neural and behavioural processes underlying empathy?
Genetics of Empathy and Emotion Perception
The experience and perception of emotional states is a primary building block for social behaviour. It is therefore of immense theoretical interest to uncover the molecular bedrock of these ancient instincts. While there is a large body of animal literature on the molecular underpinnings of social-emotional behaviour, work on humans is comparatively recent, and has been limited to correlational studies of genetic variability with behavioural and neural measures. Our work seeks to expand these frontiers , studying how genetic polymorphisms relate to individual differences in emotion perception and empathy.
