I am a physical therapist. When I want my hypotonic patient to become more alert, I become very alert. She responds to my movement quality which expresses my affect and also becomes more alert. A mother opens her mouth when she wants to feed her baby. The baby opens his mouth. Kinesthetic empathy is what we feel in our bodies when we see other people move. We may or may not translate that feeling into movement. Is there a connection between kinesthetic empathy and the putative mirror neuron system? Can anyone recommend any research papers?
Dear Deborah,
Check these papers out:
Responding to the emotions of others: Dissociating forms of empathy through the study of typical and psychiatric populations. R.J.R. Blair. Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 698–718
from the abstract: " three main divisions can be made: cognitive empathy (or Theory of Mind), motor empathy, and emotional empathy."
THE MIRROR-NEURON SYSTEM.Giacomo Rizzolatti and Laila Craighero. Annu. Rev. Neurosci. 2004. 27:169–92, email: [email protected]
I think that the mirror neuron system is over-evaluated. The mirror system is a system that give us the ability to understand what is happening comparing what we observe with our eyes with what we do (or only we imagine to do) with our body. Is not an emotional system. Is the rest of the brain that gave emotional sense to what we see.
Training the Motor Cortex by Observing the Actions of Others During Immobilization
Bassolino M1, Campanella M, Bove M, Pozzo T, Fadiga L. Cerebral Cortex 2013
I would like to echo the response of Alessandro Giannini above. It seems to me that talking in terms of kinesthetic or motor empathy amounts to misdirection. Empathy is emotional. What we are dealing with in the mirror neuron system is merely the response to a discrimination of salience---the relevance of a particular observation for the organism. The emotional valence that attaches to the observation is part of the overall 'system response,' but it is one that cannot be specifically assigned to the mirror neuron system that is typically under discussion.
Our own pathway into this issue illuminates what I am trying to convey here. We train the brains of autistic children who may not relate to their significant others. This lack of connection is likely to be reflected in non-responsiveness of the mirror neuron system. In a study at UCSD attempting to train the mirror neuron system to come on line, the results were modest. We, on the other hand, train the salience network, and then emotional connectedness follows. We presume that in the course of this functional recovery the mirror neuron system becomes responsive also, but we are not in a position to make such measurements.
So clearly the issues have to be separated. In the autistic child, the fault does not lie in the mirror neuron system, but rather in the more fundamental lack of the capacity for attachment. The same thing is seen in speech. People can waste their time trying to train left hemisphere function for speech, when in fact what is missing is the right hemisphere function of understanding the very concept of communication. Once that bottleneck is broken by training the capacity for attachment, one can often observe speech emerge quite suddenly. Speech was not the problem. In some of these non-verbal children, it was in fact fully developed. As soon as they started talking, it was in full sentences.
So in agreement with Giannini I suspect that we have assigned too much agency to the mirror neuron system. Agency does not reside there. In fact, agency is not localizable anywhere. It is an observable at the system level.
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