Empathy is a complex, multi-dimensional process. As such, it can be impaired at multiple stages, producing disorders of empathy with separable underlying causes. Studies often divide empathy into emotional and cognitive components to simplify the large space of empathic processes. This practice can be helpful, but also causes people to misunderstand their interdependence at the level of the mechanism and how they correspond to surveys and tasks. As a result, inferences made from experimental results are often incorrect and cannot be integrated across studies. We explain how emotional and cognitive empathy overlap through the proximate mechanism and clarify their operationalization in common surveys and tasks. A systematic review of three clinical disorders is used to highlight this issue and reinterpret and unite results according to the proximate framework--Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD). Aligning constructs through the proximate mechanism allows us to understand both empathy and its disorders.

中文翻译：

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通过关注神经机制来了解同理心及其障碍。

移情是一个复杂的、多维的过程。因此，它可能在多个阶段受到损害，产生具有可分离的潜在原因的同理心障碍。研究通常将移情分为情感和认知成分，以简化移情过程的大空间。这种做法可能会有所帮助，但也会导致人们误解他们在机制层面的相互依赖以及它们如何对应调查和任务。因此，根据实验结果做出的推论通常是不正确的，并且无法在研究中整合。我们解释了情感和认知移情如何通过近似机制重叠，并阐明它们在常见调查和任务中的操作化。使用对三种临床疾病的系统评价来突出这一问题，并根据近似框架——边缘性人格障碍 (BPD)、自恋型人格障碍 (NPD) 和额颞叶痴呆 (FTD) 重新解释和统一结果。通过近似机制调整结构使我们能够理解同理心及其障碍。