"What it shows us is that we have this inborn capacity to resonate with the pain of others. That's probably a very important step toward empathy," said Jean Decety of the University of Chicago, whose study appears in the journal Neuropsychologia. For the study, the researchers showed 17 children aged 7 to 12 animated images of people experiencing pain while they were undergoing a type of imaging known as functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI. The series of images depicted accidents, such as a heavy bowl falling on a pair of hands, and situations in which pain was inflicted on purpose, such as someone slamming a car door on a person's hand. They also were shown images without painful encounters. ---------Read more at: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080711/hl_nm/empathy_dc;_ylt=ArNsiCtns5qni.N8D_ujFxYQ.3QA