The empathy is the ability to perceive and understand other people's emotions and intentions and to respond accordingly, and it is of great significance for human beings to establish and maintain social relations. A large number of studies have shown that the exercise can promote the empathy. Specifically, it is known that, from the exercise interest and the exercise mode, one can positively predict the empathy, while the relationship between the exercise experience, the exercise volume, and the empathy is not clear; The exercise promotes the empathy through two possible cognitive neural mechanisms:The exercise promotes the emotional empathy by activating the mirror nervous system, and the exercise promotes the cognitive empathy by promoting the cognitive control system. However, this hypothesis still lacks adequate evidences. Generally, more evidences are needed to solve the following problems:Current research results are not comparable due to their different and insufficient research designs; Most of the studies focused on the healthy people while ignoring the clinical people who need to improve their empathy; In the most researches of the cognitive neural mechanism, only one technology instead of the multimodal imaging technology is used, with the limitations in the data repeatability. It is suggested that future researches should:1) further refine the experimental design, clarify the dose-effects of the exercise interest, the exercise experience, and the exercise volume on different components of the empathy; 2) pay attention to the development of the exercise prescriptions for people with empathy defects such as the autism and Alzheimer's disease; 3) promote interdisciplinary integration and technological innovation, and deepen the research of the cognitive neural mechanism of the impact of the exercise on the empathy.

exercise  /  empathy  /  cognitive neural mechanism