Ape Empathy: BBS Call for Commentators

Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article EMPATHY: ITS ULTIMATE AND PROXIMATE BASES by S.D. Preston & F. B. M. de Waal http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Preston/ or http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Preston/Preston.pdf Please reply to: calls(a)bbsonline.org This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to: calls(a)bbsonline.org If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. A full electronic list of current BBS Associates is available at this location to help you select a name: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime, your name, address and email address will be entered into our database as an unaffiliated investigator.) To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator. To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the online BBSPrints Archive, at the URL that follows the abstract below. _____________________________________________________________ Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases Stephanie D. Preston Department of Psychology 3210 Tolman Hall #1650 University of California at Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720-1650 USA spreston(a)socrates.berkeley.edu http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~spreston Frans B. M. de Waal Living Links, Yerkes Primate Center and Psychology Department, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322 USA dewaal(a)rmy.emory.edu http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/ KEYWORDS: altruism; cognitive empathy; comparative; emotion; emotional contagion; empathy; evolution; human; perception-action; perspective taking; ABSTRACT: There is disagreement in the literature about the exact nature of the phenomenon of empathy. There are emotional, cognitive, and conditioning views, applying in varying degrees across species. An adequate description of the ultimate and proximate mechanism can integrate these views. Proximately, the perception of an object's state activates the subject's corresponding representations, which in turn activate somatic and autonomic responses. This mechanism supports basic behaviors (e.g., alarm, social facilitation, vicariousness of emotions, mother-infant responsiveness, and the modeling of competitors and predators) that are crucial for the reproductive success of animals living in groups. The "Perception-Action Model" (PAM) together with an understanding of how representations change with experience can explain the major empirical effects in the literature (similarity, familiarity, past experience, explicit teaching and salience). It can also predict a variety of empathy disorders. The interaction between the PAM and prefrontal functioning can also explain different levels of empathy across species and age groups. This view can advance our evolutionary understanding of empathy beyond inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism and can explain different levels of empathy across individuals, species, stages of development, and situations. http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Preston/ or http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Preston/Preston.pdf ___________________________________________________________ Please do not prepare a commentary yet. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the article. 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Meantime please see: http://www.bbsonline.org/help/ and http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- (3) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review. (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential impact!). *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*