Our brains have the power to do more than we may ever truly discover. Of the many things our brains can do, empathy is one of the most interesting. We know that empathy plays a major role in our lives and connects to the fields on business, science, law, writing, and so much more. What most people don’t understand is the neural mechanisms behind it. Scientists believe that they have begun to comprehend the processes of empathy from our brain’s perspective. This is ground breaking because if we are able to uncover how our brain accomplishes empathy, we can use that to expand all the industries that use empathy. My question is; how does a child’s brain produce empathy and how does it compare to an adult’s brain producing empathy? Along the way I plan to address gender differences and investigate if they’re different from birth or if we mature into one gender’s preference over another. If we can produce a fluid continuum of empathy’s development in humans then we can start to understand empathy how we know it, and then expand on what we already know with a scientific backing.

MLA Formatted List of Potential Sources

Decety, Jean. “The neurodevelopment of empathy in humans.” Developmental neuroscience 32.4 (2010): 257-267.

Mason, Peggy. “With a little help from our friends: How the brain processes empathy.” Cerebrum: the Dana forum on brain science. Vol. 2014. Dana Foundation, 2014.

Schulte-Rüther, Martin, et al. “Gender differences in brain networks supporting empathy.” Neuroimage 42.1 (2008): 393-403.

Tousignant, Béatrice, Fanny Eugène, and Philip L. Jackson. “A developmental perspective on the neural bases of human empathy.” Infant Behavior and Development 48 (2017): 5-12.

Tusche, Anita, et al. “Decoding the charitable brain: empathy, perspective taking, and attention shifts differentially predict altruistic giving.” Journal of Neuroscience 36.17 (2016): 4719-4732.