Jean Decety
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Jean Decety | |
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| Born | 1959 France |
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| Residence |  Chicago, USA |
| Nationality | French |
| Fields | Social Neuroscience |
| Institutions | University of Chicago (professor) |
| Alma mater | Université Claude Bernard, Lyon; France |
| Doctoral advisor | Marc Jeannerod |
Jean Decety is a neuroscientist and an internationally recognized expert in social neuroscience. His research focuses on the neurobiological mechanisms underpinning social cognition, particularly empathy, sympathy, perspective taking, emotional regulation and more generally interpersonal processes.
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[edit] Background
Decety received two advanced Master degrees in 1985 (neuroscience) and in 1987 (biological and medical engineering sciences) and a Ph.D. in 1989 (neurobiology) from the Université Claude Bernard. He also obtained a Master degree in cognitive psychology from the University Lumière in 1986. After receiving his doctorate, he worked as a post-doc fellow at the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm in the Departments of neurophysiology and neuroradiology under the supervision of Per Roland. He then joined the National Institute for Medical Research (INSERM) in Lyon until 2001. He is currently professor at the University of Chicago, with appointments in psychology and psychiatry. He is the director of the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, and the co-director of the Brain Research Imaging Center at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Decety is an executive committee member of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience and a member of the Center for Integrative Neuroscience and Neuroengineering.
He married to Sylvie Bendier in 1993 and has two sons (Nathan and Glenn Ariel).
[edit] Editorial duties
Decety serves as the editor of Social Neuroscience and is on the editorial boards of The Scientific World Journal and of Neuropsychologia. Decety is a member of the faculty advisory committee of the France Chicago Center.
[edit] Early research
During his Ph.D. training and onwards, Decety combined behavioral, physiological and functional neuroimaging measures to investigate the cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in mental simulation of action, also known as motor imagery, a technique used by athletes to rehearse and improve their performance. A series of experiments demonstrated that mental simulation can activate heart and respiration control mechanisms.[1] Imagining an action or actually performing that action share similar neural circuits [2], and these circuits are also activated when one observes an action executed by another individual.[3] These findings support the common coding theory between perception and action put forward by Roger Sperry and more recently by Wolfgang Prinz. Decety and colleagues proposed that is this perception–action coupling mechanism offers an interesting foundation for intersubjectivity because it provides a functional bridge between first-person information and third-person information, grounded on self-other equivalence [4][5] which allows analogical reasoning, and offers a possible route to understanding others.
[edit] Current research
Later research includes the investigation of empathy, sympathy, personal distress, emotion regulation and perspective taking in healthy individuals as well as people with social behavior disorders. [6]
[edit] Selected works
- Decety, J. (2005). “Perspective taking as the royal avenue to empathy.” In B.F. Malle, & S. D. Hodges (Eds.), Other Minds: How Humans Bridge the Divide between Self and Others, (pp. 135-149). New York: Guilford Publishers.
- Decety, J., & Grezes, J. (2006). “The power of simulation: Imagining one's own and other's behavior.” Brain Research, 1079, 4-14.
- Decety, J., & Lamm, C. (2007). “The role of the right temporoparietal junction in social interaction: How low-level computational processes contribute to meta-cognition.” The Neuroscientist, 13, 580-593.
- Lamm, C., Batson, C.D., & Decety, J. (2007). “The neural substrate of human empathy: effects of perspective-taking and cognitive appraisal.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 42-58.
- Decety, J. (2007). “A social cognitive neuroscience model of human empathy.” In E. Harmon-Jones & P. Winkielman (Eds.), Social Neuroscience: Integrating Biological and Psychological Explanations of Social Behavior (pp. 246-270). New York: Guilford Publications.
[edit] References
- ^ Decety, Jean (1993), “Central activation of autonomic effectors during mental simulation of motor actions in man”, Journal of Physiology 461: 549-563
- ^ Decety, Jean (1994), “Mapping motor representations with positron emission tomography”, Nature 371: 600-602
- ^ Decety, Jean (1997), “Brain activity during observation of actions. Influence of action content and subject’s strategy”, Brain 120: 1763-1777
- ^ Jackson, Philip (2004), “Motor cognition: A new paradigm to investigate social interactions”, Current Opinion in Neurobiology 14: 1-5
- ^ Decety, Jean (2007), “The empathic brain and its dysfunction in psychiatric populations: implications for intervention across different clinical conditions”, BioPsychoSocial Medicine 1: 22-65
