ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2021
Recognizing humanity: dehumanization predicts neural mirroring and empathic accuracy in face-to-face interactions.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Influence of Victim and Perpetrator Empathy on Punitive Attitudes Toward Individuals Who Sexually Offend.Sexual abuse : a journal of research and treatment · 2026Article
- A transdisciplinary framework for empathy research.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Neural responses to emotional displays by politicians: differential mu and alpha suppression patterns in response to in-party and out-party leaders.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Measurement of Dehumanization, Self-Dehumanization, and Empathy as Mediating Factors Among Healthcare Professionals.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Bonding with nature: a validation of the dispositional empathy with nature scale in Italy.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Feedback matters: EEG correlates of empathy involved in the naturalistic communication of emotions.Heliyon · 2024Article
- Mu rhythm suppression over sensorimotor regions is associated with greater empathic accuracy.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
Dehumanization is the failure to recognize the cognitive and emotional complexities of the people around us. While its presence has been well documented in horrific acts of violence, it is also theorized to play a role in everyday life. We measured its presence and effects in face-to-face dyadic interactions between strangers and found that not only was there variance in the extent to which they perceived one another as human, but this variance predicted neural processing and behavior. Specifically, participants showed stronger neural mirroring, indexed by electroencephalography (EEG) mu-suppression, in response to partners they evaluated as more human, suggesting their brains neurally simulated those targets' actions more. Participants were also marginally more empathically accurate about the emotions of partners deemed more human and performed better with them on a cooperative task. These results suggest that there are indeed differences in our recognition of the humanity of people we meet-demonstrated for the first time in a real, face-to-face interaction-and that this mundane variation affects our ability to neurally simulate, cooperate and empathize.
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