Kucerova Barbora, Levit-Binnun Nava, Gordon Ilanit, Golland Yulia
Psychology Department, Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic.
Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology, Reichman University, Herzliya 4610101, Israel.
Biology (Basel). 2023 Jan 25;12(2):183. doi: 10.3390/biology12020183.
Compassion is a warm response of care and concern for those who are suffering, which drives individuals to devote their resources for the sake of others. A prominent neuroevolutionary framework grounds compassion in the neurobiology of the mammalian caregiving system. Accordingly, it has been suggested that the oxytocinergic system, which plays a central role in parental caregiving and bonding, provides the neurobiological foundation for compassion towards strangers. Yet, the specific role of oxytocin in compassion is far from clear. The current paper aims to target this gap and offer a theoretical framework that integrates the state-of-the-art literature on oxytocin with research on compassion. We suggest that oxytocin mediates compassion by enhancing the saliency of cues of pain and distress and discuss the plausible underlying neurobiological substrates. We further demonstrate how the proposed framework can account for individual differences in compassion, focusing on the effects of attachment on caregiving and support. The proposed framework integrates the current scientific understanding of oxytocin function with compassion-related processes. It thus highlights the largely ignored attentional processes in compassion and taps into the vast variability of responses in social contexts involving pain and suffering.
同情是对受苦者的一种温暖的关怀和关切反应，它促使个体为他人奉献自己的资源。一个著名的神经进化框架将同情建立在哺乳动物照料系统的神经生物学基础上。因此，有人提出，在父母照料和情感联系中起核心作用的催产素能系统为对陌生人的同情提供了神经生物学基础。然而，催产素在同情中的具体作用还远未明确。本文旨在填补这一空白，并提供一个理论框架，将关于催产素的最新文献与同情研究整合起来。我们认为，催产素通过增强疼痛和痛苦线索的显著性来介导同情，并讨论了可能的潜在神经生物学基础。我们进一步展示了所提出的框架如何能够解释同情方面的个体差异，重点关注依恋对照料和支持的影响。所提出的框架将目前对催产素功能的科学理解与同情相关过程整合在一起。因此，它突出了同情中很大程度上被忽视的注意力过程，并深入探讨了涉及疼痛和苦难的社会情境中反应的巨大变异性。
