Empathy is usually deployed in social interactions. Nevertheless, common measures and examinations of empathy study this construct in isolation from the person in distress. In this article we seek to extend the field of examination to include both empathizer and target to determine whether and how empathic responses are affected by feedback and learned through interaction. Building on computational approaches in feedback-based adaptations (e.g., no feedback, model-free and model-based learning), we propose a framework for understanding how empathic responses are learned on the basis of feedback. In this framework, adaptive empathy, defined as the ability to adapt one’s empathic responses, is a central aspect of empathic skills and can provide a new dimension to the evaluation and investigation of empathy. By extending existing neural models of empathy, we suggest that adaptive empathy may be mediated by interactions between the neural circuits associated with valuation, shared distress, observation-execution, and mentalizing. Finally, we propose that adaptive empathy should be considered a prominent facet of empathic capabilities with the potential to explain empathic behavior in health and psychopathology.

同理心通常部署在社交互动中。然而，同理心的常用测量和检查将这种结构与处于困境的人隔离开来。在本文中，我们试图将检查领域扩展到包括移情者和目标，以确定移情反应是否以及如何受到反馈的影响并通过互动学习。基于基于反馈的适应中的计算方法（例如，无反馈、无模型和基于模型的学习），我们提出了一个框架来理解如何在反馈的基础上学习移情反应。在这个框架中，自适应移情，被定义为适应一个人的移情反应的能力，是移情技能的一个核心方面，可以为移情的评估和调查提供一个新的维度。通过扩展现有的同理心神经模型，我们建议适应性同理心可以通过与估值、共享痛苦、观察执行和心智化相关的神经回路之间的相互作用来调节。最后，我们建议应将适应性移情视为移情能力的一个突出方面，并有可能解释健康和精神病理学中的移情行为。