Place-related neural activity in setting the stage for empathy

What makes people experience varying degrees of empathy? Common accounts focus on interpersonal attributes, including victims’ group membership or social proximity to the observer. Here we demonstrate the contribution of imagining the scenes surrounding victims in driving empathy. Although imagination has been shown to moderate empathy, the relative importance of its components is unknown. Using fMRI (N = 48; right-handed, healthy, male adults), we separately identified activation maps preferentially associated with imagining places and persons, respectively. When participants imagined misfortunes happening to individuals in specific places, both the place and person maps jointly predicted affective empathy, and, less consistently, prosocial behavior. Place-preferential activation was at least as predictive as person-preferential activation. Results were robust to several group-, participant-, trial-level, and covariate-adjusted analyses. Moreover, place-preferential activation itself was strongly predicted by person liking, beyond place-related ratings. These findings are consistent with social affinity potentiating place imagination, which in turn increases empathy, above and beyond person imagination.