Jean Decety

About

Jean Decety is a Professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Psychology. His research activities focus on socioemotional processing, empathy, moral cognition, and the neural mechanisms underlying these functions. He has conducted extensive studies on empathy deficits, psychopathy, and moral decision-making, utilizing neuroimaging techniques to explore the structural and functional aspects of the brain related to social and emotional behaviors. His work also investigates the impact of childhood abuse, neurodegenerative disorders, and traumatic brain injury on empathy and moral processing. Decety's contributions include advancing understanding of the neural correlates of moral and social cognition, and he has been involved in research examining the effects of social norms, psychopathic traits, and neurodevelopmental factors on social behavior and emotional regulation.

Research topics

• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Cognitive psychology
• Psychotherapist
• Cognitive science
• Psychiatry
• Medicine
• Developmental psychology

Selected publications

• Empathy in Medicine: What It Is, and How Much We Really Need It

  The American Journal of Medicine · 2020 · 277 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  DOI

• The emergence of empathy: A developmental neuroscience perspective

  Developmental Review · 2021 · 123 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  DOI

• The social neuroscience of music: Understanding the social brain through human song.

  American Psychologist · 2021 · 101 citations

  During the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen that people can adapt quickly to ensure that their social needs are met after being forced to isolate and socially distance. Many individuals turned immediately to music, as evidenced by people singing from balconies, watching live concerts on social media, and group singing online. In this article, we show how these musical adaptations can be understood through the latest advances in the social neuroscience of music-an area that, to date, has been larg…

  DOI

• The role of external factors in affect-sharing and their neural bases

  Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews · 2024-01-09 · 21 citations

  articleOpen access

  Affect-sharing, the ability to vicariously feel another person's emotions, is the primary component of empathy that is typically thought to rely on the observer's capacity to feel the emotions of others. However, external signals, such as the target's physical characteristics, have been demonstrated to influence affect-sharing in the neuroscientific literature that speaks to the underappreciated role of external factors in eliciting affect-sharing. We consider factors that influence affect-shari…

  PublisherDOI

• Empathy in autistic children: Emotional overarousal in response to others' physical pain

  Autism Research · 2024-08-01 · 10 citations

  article

  Different empathic responses are often reported in autism but remain controversial. To investigate which component of empathy is most affected by autism, we examined the affective, cognitive, and motivational components of empathy in 25 5- to 8-year-old autistic and 27 neurotypical children. Participants were presented with visual stimuli depicting people's limbs in painful or nonpainful situations while their eye movements, pupillary responses, and verbal ratings of pain intensity and empathic…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01MH084934

  NIH · $1.5M · 2015

• Cognitive Neuroscience of Empathy

  NSF · $650k · 2007–2013

• NIH Grant R01MH087525

  NIH · $1.6M · 2016

Frequent coauthors

• Kent A. Kiehl

  Mind Research Network

  89 shared

• Agustín Ibáñez

  Adolfo Ibáñez University

  70 shared

• Christoph Segebarth

  Grenoble Institute of Neurosciences

  51 shared

• Carla L. Harenski

  Mind Research Network

  49 shared

• Yawei Cheng

  National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

  37 shared

• Marc Jeannerod

  32 shared

• Jason M. Cowell

  University of Wisconsin–Green Bay

  32 shared

• Chantal Delon‐Martin

  Inserm

  28 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Psychology

  University of Chicago

  1993

• M.A., Psychology

  University of Chicago

  1989

• B.A., Psychology

  University of Paris

  1986

Similar researchers at University of Chicago

• Harriet de With-99
• Edward Awhh-61
• Brent Doironh-54