Empathy versus Compassion
In this chapter, we will focus on describing what we know about the experiential and neuronal
bases of empathy and compassion. However, unlike most neuroscientific literature reviews, which
usually adopt an exclusively data-driven third-person perspective, we will also add a first-person
approach to the description of empathy and compassion research. More specifically, we will
describe how we advanced our understanding of the nature of vicarious emotions and motivations
such as empathy and compassion by combining knowledge gained from a first-person, subjective
experience of a contemplative long-term practitioner (Matthieu Ricard), on the one hand, and
objective empirical findings gained from neuroscientific studies (Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki),
on the other hand.
The journey began with the initial contact between Matthieu Ricard, a long-term Buddhist
meditation practitioner and former scientist, and Tania Singer, a psychologist and neuroscientist,
who was working on the neuronal basis of empathy at the Wellcome Department of Imaging
Neuroscience in London. In so-called empathy-for-pain experiments, Tania Singer and her team
had devised a paradigm in which the brain activity of participants could be measured with
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they either experienced painful stimulation
themselves or observed another person receiving painful stimulation (Figure1).
Figure 1.
Setup of an “empathy-for-pain paradigm”. The brain activation of the participant lying in the fMRI scanner is
measured while he and other persons seated next to the scanner receive painful and non-painful stimulations to the
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