Learning the value of stimuli and actions from others—social learning—adaptively
contributes to individual survival and plays a key role in cultural evolution. We review …

During social interactions, people tend to automatically align with, or mimic their interactor's
facial expressions, vocalizations, postures and other bodily states. Automatic mimicry might …

Empathy features a tension between automaticity and context dependency. On the one
hand, people often take on each other's internal states reflexively and outside of awareness …

How does our brain choose the best course of action? Choices between material goods are
thought to be steered by neural value signals that encode the rewarding properties of the …

The medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) has been posited to serve a variety of social, affective,
and cognitive functions. These conclusions have largely been driven by forward inference …

Lay intuitions suggest that the ability to share, celebrate, and enjoy others' positive emotions–
a phenomenon we term positive empathy–bolsters individual well‐being and relationship …

Empathy—the ability to share the feelings of others—is fundamental to our emotional and
social lives. Previous human imaging studies focusing on empathy for others' pain have …

Why do we self-sacrifice to help others in distress? Two competing theories have emerged,
one suggesting that prosocial behavior is primarily motivated by feelings of empathic other …

Social animals including humans share a range of social mechanisms that are automatic
and implicit and enable learning by observation. Learning from others includes imitation of …

Prosocial behavior is a central feature of human life and a major focus of research across
the natural and social sciences. Most theoretical models of prosociality share a common …