Anat Perry is an associate professor at the Psychology department, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she established the University’s Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab. Before joining the Hebrew University, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Perry studies various facets of empathy and related social processes through the prism of social cognitive neuroscience. Three pressing questions motivate her research. (1) First, what are the behavioral and brain mechanisms that underlie social psychological phenomena, specifically those relating to empathy and understanding others? (2) Second, what overlap or divergence exists between social and non-social cognitive processes? (3) Finally, how can answers to the previous two questions help us understand deficits in social cognition (e.g., autism, social anxiety, psychopathy)? Her research combines theoretical insight with a broad set of research techniques in order to elucidate the methods by which we empathize with others.
