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Jean Decety

Jean Decety is Irving B. Harris Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Chicago. He is the editor of Empathy: From Bench to Bedside and coeditor of The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, both published by the MIT Press.

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Titles by This Editor

The Moral Brain

A Multidisciplinary Perspective
Edited by Jean Decety and Thalia Wheatley

Over the past decade, an explosion of empirical research in a variety of fields has allowed us to understand human moral sensibility as a sophisticated integration of cognitive, emotional, and motivational mechanisms shaped through evolution, development, and culture. Evolutionary biologists have shown that moral cognition evolved to aid cooperation; developmental psychologists have demonstrated that the elements that underpin morality are in place much earlier than we thought; and social neuroscientists have begun to map brain circuits implicated in moral decision making.

Empathy

From Bench to Bedside
Edited by Jean Decety

There are many reasons for scholars to investigate empathy. Empathy plays a crucial role in human social interaction at all stages of life; it is thought to help motivate positive social behavior, inhibit aggression, and provide the affective and motivational bases for moral development; it is a necessary component of psychotherapy and patient-physician interactions. This volume covers a wide range of topics in empathy theory, research, and applications, helping to integrate perspectives as varied as anthropology and neuroscience.

The Social Neuroscience of Empathy

Edited by Jean Decety and William Ickes

In recent decades, empathy research has blossomed into a vibrant and multidisciplinary field of study. The social neuroscience approach to the subject is premised on the idea that studying empathy at multiple levels (biological, cognitive, and social) will lead to a more comprehensive understanding of how other people’s thoughts and feelings can affect our own thoughts, feelings, and behavior.