Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky

In other words, once reward contingencies are learned, dopamine is less about reward than about its anticipation.

collectivist cultures enforce with shame, while individualistic cultures use guilt.

In that sense “sympathy” means you feel sorry for someone else’s pain without understanding it. In contrast, “empathy” contains the cognitive component of understanding the cause of someone’s pain, taking his perspective, walking in his shoes.

[Empathy] can also offer a dangerous sense of completion: that something has been done because something has been felt. It is tempting to think that feeling someone’s pain is necessarily virtuous in its own right. The peril of empathy isn’t simply that it can make us feel bad, but that it can make us feel good, which can in turn encourage us to think of empathy as an end in itself rather than part of a process, a catalyst.46

But as far as those neurons in the ACC are concerned, social and literal pain are the same.