Abstract:

Empathy, which enables individuals to share and understand others' feelings, is of great significance for human survival and social interaction and serves as one of the key elements in psychotherapy. Evidence from animal models, as well as clinical and non-clinical populations, indicates that the core brain network of empathy involves the anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula, amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex,etc. Empathy also involves activities in the autonomic nervous and endocrine systems. Based on the neurobiological foundation of empathy, researchers have combined behavioral experiments with neuroimaging and physiological signal measurements to further understand and quantify empathy. Breakthroughs in computational empathy, driven by advances in artificial intelligence, have enabled the automated assessment of empathy through features extracted from multimodal data and the simulation of empathy. Future research needs to develop behavioral paradigms with higher ecological validity, integrate multimodal data from visual, linguistic, and physiological signals, and optimize algorithmic ethics and cross-cultural applicability to facilitate the application of empathy research in domains such as psychotherapy, education, and human-computer interaction.The paper reviews recent advances in empathy research from an interdisciplinary perspective, integrating neurobiology and computer science. It covers the neurobiological mechanisms of empathy, methods for measuring and assessing empathy, and the application of artificial intelligence techniques in empathy research.

Key words: empathy, neurobiological mechanisms, computational empathy, psychotherapy, human-computer interaction