Empathy has been a central focus of research and popular interest over the last decade. There has been several well acknowledged controversies in psychology, biology and ethology, over whether empathy is an emotional (sensing another"s feelings) versus cognitive (understanding another"s perspective) construct. In our studies we attempt to address this by combining lesion studies and psychiatry research to support the notion of two separate systems for empathy: an emotional system (involving the mirror neuron system) and a cognitive system (involving medial prefrontal cortices). We examined our model with several psychiatric populations such as schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder and psychopathy and show that the dissociation between cognitive and emotional empathy is implicated in these populations.