Empathy is part of basic social cognition and is central to everyday interactions. Indeed, emotional and cognitive empathy deficits are related to various psychopathologies, yet the links reported ...have been inconsistent. Thus, the mechanism underlying these inconsistent links is poorly understood. At least a partial answer may lie in that the dependency between cognitive and emotional empathy has been overlooked. Here, we examined the (dis)equilibrium between emotional and cognitive empathy and how it relates to individual differences in clinical traits. We further examined a possible mediator of these links-emotional reactivity.
Participants (
= 425) from the general population reported on their empathy, emotional reactivity, autistic traits, psychopathic tendencies, and symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Beyond empathy, both extremes of empathic disequilibrium were associated with various features of clinical conditions; Higher emotional relative to cognitive empathy was related to the social domain of autism and anxiety, while higher cognitive relative to emotional empathy was related to the non-social domain of autism, depression symptoms, and psychopathic tendencies. The associations with autistic traits, anxiety, and psychopathic tendencies were mediated by emotional reactivity.
Our findings suggest a new framework for understanding how individual variability in empathy is expressed in various psychopathologies.
Empathy is not in our genes Heyes, Cecilia
Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews,
12/2018, Volume:
95
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
•Empathy is a cornerstone of healthcare, social justice, and international relations.•Empathy depends on automatic (Empathy1) and controlled (Empathy2) mechanisms.•The automatic mechanism, Empathy1, ...is constructed by associative learning.•Self-stimulation, synchronous emotion and affect mirroring provide inputs to learning.•Empathy can be enhanced by novel experience and broken by social change.
In academic and public life empathy is seen as a fundamental force of morality – a psychological phenomenon, rooted in biology, with profound effects in law, policy, and international relations. But the roots of empathy are not as firm as we like to think. The matching mechanism that distinguishes empathy from compassion, envy, schadenfreude, and sadism is a product of learning. Here I present a dual system model that distinguishes Empathy1, an automatic process that catches the feelings of others, from Empathy2, controlled processes that interpret those feelings. Research with animals, infants, adults and robots suggests that the mechanism of Empathy1, emotional contagion, is constructed in the course of development through social interaction. Learned Matching implies that empathy is both agile and fragile. It can be enhanced and redirected by novel experience, and broken by social change.
► We examine the empathic deficits of the dark triad of personality. ► We assess both cognitive and affective empathic deficits. ► We utilised both self-reports and cognitive tasks. ► The dark triad ...is almost exclusively related to affective empathic deficits. ► Primary psychopathy is the main predictor of such deficits.
The dark triad represents the most prominent, socially aversive personalities (viz., Psychopathy, Narcissism, and Machiavellianism) characterised by a common underlying deficit in empathy. Although, evidence shows that empathy can be further divided into cognitive and affective systems, this two-dimensional conceptualisation had not been considered when examining the empathic impairments of the complete dark triad. The present study aimed to determine whether the dark triad is associated with deficits in cognitive or affective empathy as measured through self-reports and facial expressions tasks. The sample comprised 139 university students. All dark triad personalities were associated with deficits in affective empathy, but showed little evidence of impairment in cognitive empathy. The facial expression tasks provided further support for the affective nature of the dark triad’s empathic deficits. Finally, the results emphasised the importance of primary psychopathy, as the main predictor of empathic deficits within the dark triad.
L’empathie, notamment l’empathie à la douleur, constitue une importante question de recherche. Elle joue en effet un rôle fondamental dans les processus sociaux chez de nombreuses espèces animales et ...chez l’homme. Cette revue regroupe dans un premier temps les données cliniques et animales connues sur l’empathie à la douleur et les réseaux neuronaux qui la sous-tendent. Ensuite, elle s’intéresse aux données qui démontrent un impact de l’environnement précoce sur le développement des processus d’empathie à la douleur. Plusieurs publications suggèrent en effet que dans les cas de prématurité ou de trauma dans l’enfance, les capacités d’empathie à la douleur sont impactées.
Empathy, in particular empathy to pain, is an important research question. It indeed plays a key role in social processes in many animal species and in human. This review summarizes the clinical and animal data on empathy to pain and its neuronal network. Then, it discusses the data showing an impact of early life environment on the development of empathy to pain processes. Several publications indeed sug-gest that in the case of preterm birth or trauma during early childhood, empathy to pain abilities can be impacted.
This research was conducted with two main goals—to contribute to knowledge on the development of empathy from early adolescence to adulthood, including its contribution to decoding emotion ...expression, and to improve the understanding of the nature of empathy by simultaneously assessing empathy toward two different targets—humans and animals. It unfolded into two cross-sectional studies: One (S1) obtaining measures of empathy toward humans and animals as targets across five age groups (from pre-adolescents to adults); and another (S2) where a subset of the adolescents who participated in S1 were assessed in emotion expression decoding and subjective and physiological responses to emotional video clips. The results of S1 showed that empathy toward animals and most dimensions of empathy toward humans increase toward adulthood, with important gender differences in empathy to animals and humans, and empathy levels in girls starting off in the age trajectory at higher levels, A moderate correlation between empathy toward human and toward animal targets was also found. S2 showed that the expression of positive emotion is better recognized than that of negative emotion, surprise, or neutral expression, and that the measure of human-directed empathy predicts successful decoding of negative emotion, whereas skin conductance responses (SCRs) and subjective valence ratings predicted successful identification of positive emotion. Gender differences emerged but not across all age groups nor all subscales. Results yield keys to the developmental “pace” and trajectory of the various dimensions of empathy and to how empathy relates to emotion decoding.
The Science of Empathy Riess, Helen
Journal of patient experience,
06/2017, Volume:
4, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Empathy plays a critical interpersonal and societal role, enabling sharing of experiences, needs, and desires between individuals and providing an emotional bridge that promotes pro-social behavior. ...This capacity requires an exquisite interplay of neural networks and enables us to perceive the emotions of others, resonate with them emotionally and cognitively, to take in the perspective of others, and to distinguish between our own and others’ emotions. Studies show empathy declines during medical training. Without targeted interventions, uncompassionate care and treatment devoid of empathy, results in patients who are dissatisfied. They are then much less likely to follow through with treatment recommendations, resulting in poorer health outcomes and damaged trust in health providers. Cognitive empathy must play a role when a lack of emotional empathy exists because of racial, ethnic, religious, or physical differences. Healthcare settings are no exception to conscious and unconscious biases, and there is no place for discrimination or unequal care afforded to patients who differ from the majority culture or the majority culture of healthcare providers. Much work lies ahead to make healthcare equitable for givers and receivers of healthcare from all cultures. Self- and other-empathy leads to replenishment and renewal of a vital human capacity. If we are to move in the direction of a more empathic society and a more compassionate world, it is clear that working to enhance our native capacities to empathize is critical to strengthening individual, community, national, and international bonds.
People consume alcohol for multiple reasons. Negative motives are often associated with alcohol-related problems. These problems might be explained by negative effects of high alcohol consumption on ...empathy. Past studies have associated alcohol use disorder (AUD) with reduced cognitive and affective empathy. Few studies have focused on non-clinical samples and considered behavioral empathy. We examined the links between alcohol consumption and multiple aspects of empathy, and if these links were moderated by negative drinking motives. We collected online data of 520 unselected individuals. All completed the AUD Identification Test (AUDIT) and a Drinking Motives Questionnaire. Affective and cognitive empathy were assessed using the Empathy Quotient. Behavioral empathy was assessed by asking participants how likely they would help the person in each of 24 scenarios involving pain. Helping others in pain was positively predicted by affective and cognitive empathy. Higher AUDIT scores were associated with helping others less, particularly among participants who scored higher on drinking to cope with negative affect. People who drink more and do so to cope with negative affect appear to have less behavioral empathy. This supports the view that negative drinking motives contribute to AUD risk.
Autism and empathy: What are the real links? Fletcher-Watson, Sue; Bird, Geoffrey
Autism : the international journal of research and practice,
01/2020, Volume:
24, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by reduced pain empathy—a process that is grounded in first-hand pain perception. Because autistic traits are continuously distributed in the general ...population, we hypothesized that first-hand pain sensitivity would mediate the link between autistic traits and pain empathy. After controlling for alexithymia, higher autistic traits were associated with lower cognitive and emotional empathy in response to others’ pain, as well as lower sensitivity to cold and heat pain (higher cold pain tolerance and lower laser heat pain-intensity ratings). Importantly, pain sensitivity fully mediated the link between autistic traits and pain empathy. These findings highlight the role of atypical first-hand pain sensitivity in the lack of pain empathy observed in people with high autistic traits or ASD.
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