Elsevier

Brain and Cognition

Volume 103, March 2016, Pages 50-61
Brain and Cognition

Effects of empathic social responses on the emotions of the recipient

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2015.11.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Effects of emotionally and cognitively empathic comments were investigated.

  • Both types of empathy influenced self-reported feelings in a positive way.

  • Empathic comments activated regions associated with social cognition and emotion.

  • Neural activations induced by empathic comments depended on emotional state.

  • Emotional and cognitive empathy activated partially separate neural clusters.

Abstract

Empathy is highly relevant for social behavior and can be verbally expressed by voicing sympathy and concern (emotional empathy) as well as by paraphrasing or stating that one can mentally reconstruct and understand another person’s thoughts and feelings (cognitive empathy). In this study, we investigated the emotional effects and neural correlates of receiving empathic social responses after negative performance feedback and compared the effects of emotionally vs. cognitively empathic comments. 20 participants (10 male) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while receiving negative performance feedback for a cognitive task. Performance feedback was followed by verbal comments either expressing cognitive and emotional empathy or demonstrating a lack of empathy. Empathic comments in general led to less negative self-reported feelings and calmer breathing. At the neural level, empathic comments induced activity in regions associated with social cognition and emotion processing, specifically in right postcentral gyrus and left cerebellum (cognitively empathic comments), right precentral gyrus, the opercular part of left inferior frontal gyrus, and left middle temporal gyrus (emotionally empathic comments), as well as the orbital part of the left middle frontal gyrus and left superior parietal gyrus (emotionally empathic vs. unempathic comments). The study shows that cognitively and emotionally empathic comments appear to be processed in partially separable neural systems. Furthermore, confirming and expanding on another study on the same subject, the present results demonstrate that the social display of cognitive empathy exerts almost as positive effects on the recipient’s feelings and emotions in states of distress as emotionally empathic response does. This can be relevant for professional settings in which strong negative emotions need to be de-escalated while maintaining professional impartiality, which may allow the display of cognitive but not emotional empathy.

Introduction

Showing empathy is a highly relevant social interaction pattern, and yet it is one that has almost exclusively been studied with a focus on the sender (i.e. the person feeling empathy for someone else), neglecting the effects on the recipient. What are the effects of empathic social responses on the emotions of the recipient of such responses, and do cognitively and emotionally empathic social responses exert the same effects on the recipient? This important aspect of social interaction has been almost completely neglected in social neuroscience research to date. The present study addresses this gap by exploring emotional effects and neural substrates of processing empathic comments offered by another person in response to an unpleasant situation.

Empathy has been studied from many different angles and under varying definitions, with a commonly accepted definition of empathy still wanting (Bernhardt & Singer, 2012). In the neuropsychological research literature, empathy is most often conceptualized as a complex and composite construct involving several, partially dissociable neuro-cognitive systems with 3 domains: cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and motor empathy (Blair, 2005, Carr et al., 2003, Decety and Meyer, 2008). Cognitive empathy, also called theory of mind (ToM) or mentalizing, means the ability to recognize another person’s mental and emotional state as well as behavioral dispositions by abstract inference. Emotional or affective empathy refers to an observer’s emotional response to another person’s emotional state (Dziobek et al., 2008). It has been argued that the term empathy presupposes an emotional reaction that is isomorphic to another person’s affective state (Vignemont & Singer, 2006), while others define it more broadly as an affective response more appropriate to another’s situation than one’s own (Hoffman, 2000). Motor empathy is the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person (Blair, 2005). An integrative multidimensional model of empathy has been proposed by Decety, 2011, Decety and Jackson, 2004, Decety and Meyer, 2008.

Empathy can be verbally expressed by voicing emotional resonance to another’s distress (emotional empathy) as well as by paraphrasing or stating that one can mentally reconstruct and understand another person’s thoughts and feelings (cognitive empathy). Expressing cognitive empathy through paraphrasing is regularly used in professional counseling settings such as Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR; Kraybill et al., 2001, Schreier, 2002). Daily interactions, on the other hand, most often contain verbal demonstrations of emotional empathy. However, we argue that in daily life, this typically expresses itself in verbally offering compassion, sympathy, and concern, rather than an isomorphic reflection of the other person’s feelings and emotions (typical responses to another’s distress may be “I’m sorry this happened to you” rather than “If you are sad, I am sad, too”). Therefore, and as we were interested in investigating empathic social response close to daily life, we shaped our emotional empathy interventions more toward expressing compassion than isomorphic emotional reactions. It is important to note, however, that emotional empathy and compassion have been associated with different emotional effects and neural activations in the sender (Klimecki, Leiberg, Ricard, & Singer, 2014), and can therefore not be used as interchangeable terms.

To date, very little research has been dedicated to investigating the emotional effects and neuroanatomical basis of processing these social responses and professional interventions expressing empathy. As a starting point, we have been able to show that cognitively empathic social response in the form of paraphrasing can positively influence the recipient’s feelings and emotions in social conflict situations (Seehausen et al., 2012, Seehausen et al., 2014). In Seehausen et al. (2014), we interviewed participants on a real-life personal conflict and contrasted emotional effects and neural correlates of cognitively empathic vs. unempathic social responses. We found that cognitively empathic social response in the form of paraphrasing positively influenced self-reported feelings, while at the same time increasing autonomic arousal reflected by skin conductance response (SCR). In a similar vein, feeling understood has also been shown to activate neural regions associated with reward and social connection (i.e. ventral striatum and middle insula), while not feeling understood engaged neural regions previously associated with negative affect (i.e. anterior insula) (Morelli, Torre, & Eisenberger, 2014)., Finally, motor empathy in the form of facial mimicry has been repeatedly found to increase affiliation and positive social judgment not only toward the mimicker but also toward other people (Van Baaren et al., 2004, Ashton-James et al., 2007, Fischer-Lokou et al., 2011, Guéguen et al., 2011, Stel and Harinck, 2011). Hence, it seems that empathic social response displaying different types of empathy can have an effect on the recipient’s feelings and emotions. The present study directly compared the effects of verbally expressed cognitive and emotional empathy/compassion on the recipient, exploring potential differences in processing these two types of empathic social response at the neural level as well as differences in emotional effects on the recipient.

In general, the processing of empathic and unempathic social response is likely to recruit neural systems involved in social cognition, as the listener tries to decipher the speaker’s intention and sincerity, as well as meaning and social adequacy of the utterances. Social cognition is characterized as the acquisition of knowledge about other persons’ mental states as well as insight about the meaning of their behavior and verbal expressions (Przyrembel, Smallwood, Pauen, & Singer, 2012). Social cognition research approaches most often focus on the role of the mentalizing network, as well as of shared networks and the putative mirror neuron network (Bernhardt and Singer, 2012, Zaki et al., 2009). However, in the absence of visual stimuli, i.e. faces or body movements, subjects seem to rely mostly on the mentalizing system when making inferences about another’s inner state (Lamm, Decety, & Singer, 2011).

The present study addressed the following research questions: (1) what are the effects of empathic social response on the feelings and emotions of the recipient during negative performance feedback? (2) How are empathic comments processed at the neural level? (3) How does the processing of emotionally and cognitively empathic comments differ regarding neural substrates and emotional effects?

To answer these questions, cognitively and emotionally empathic and unempathic comments were offered to study participants while they were trying to solve anagrams, and kept receiving negative performance feedback combined with financial loss. This was chosen as the context for empathic social response for three reasons. Firstly, goal failure in this form is relatively easy to create in an experimental setting. Secondly, goal failure has been shown to induce negative affect (Jones, Papadakis, Orr, & Strauman, 2013). And thirdly, failure is a common experience in everyday life, one that often elicits seeking and receiving empathic social support.

Neural data were complemented by self-report ratings of positive or negative feelings, as well as measurements of skin conductance (SCR), pulse, heart rate, and respiration data. These physiological parameters have repeatedly been shown to reflect emotional responses (Critchley, 2002, Kushki et al., 2011).

Due to a lack of comparable previous research, the present study was largely exploratory. Negative performance feedback was expected to result in activations in anterior insula and amygdala, as these are core regions of emotion generation and processing (Kober et al., 2008, Ochsner et al., 2012). On a subjective experience level, we predicted less negative feelings following empathic compared to unempathic comments for both types of empathy. We have shown previously that negative feelings can be alleviated by empathic social response in the form of paraphrasing (expressing cognitive empathy) (Seehausen et al., 2012, Seehausen et al., 2014). We further hypothesized that hearing empathic comments would activate neural networks associated with social cognition, especially the mentalizing network. This is in line with findings from Morelli et al. (2014), who reported that both feeling understood and not feeling understood activated different components of the mentalizing system in their paradigm. Meta-analyses have shown a mentalizing network comprising bilateral ventro-medial and dorso-medial prefrontal cortex, precuneus, temporo-parietal junction, temporal poles, middle temporal gyrus, posterior superior temporal sulcus, and inferior frontal gyrus, as well as the right MT/V5 (Bzdok et al., 2012, Mar, 2011, Spreng et al., 2009). In addition, empathic and unempathic comments were expected to stimulate regions associated with emotion generation and processing, involving amygdala, anterior insula, medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) and striatum (Becker et al., 2012, Ochsner et al., 2012). Furthermore, we expected cognitively empathic comments and emotionally empathic comments to be processed by partially different neural systems. Cognitive and emotional empathy have been shown to involve partially separate neural systems at the experiential level (Fan, Duncan, de Greck, & Northoff, 2011), hence it seems expedient to regard them as non-identical psychological processes that also trigger partially different stimulus processing in the recipient. It also seems likely that social responses such as “I understand why you are angry right now” provoke different emotional reactions from responses such as “I am sorry it is not going well for you”, as these convey different messages about the social relationship in question.

Section snippets

Participants

20 healthy subjects [10 male; age: mean (M) = 26, standard deviation (SD) = 5.0] participated in this study. All participants were native German speakers, right-handed as assessed using the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory (Oldfield, 1971), and had no current or previous neurological or psychiatric disorder.

The study was carried out in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and was approved by the ethical committee of the Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin. All participants gave written informed

Results

20 subjects entered the fMRI analysis (10 female). Pulse and respiration data of two subjects were lost due to technical reasons, leaving 18 subjects for complete physiological analysis.

Discussion

The aim of our study was to explore and compare the emotional effects and neural correlates of cognitively and emotionally empathic comments after receiving negative performance feedback. The experiment yielded three main findings: (1) both cognitively and emotionally empathic comments led to less negative feelings and emotions compared to unempathic comments, visible in valence ratings and respiration data. (2) Emotionally empathic/compassion comments activated left mOFC and left SPG when

Conclusion

Our study confirms and expands on the results of a parallel study by our group (Seehausen et al., 2014) on the effects of empathic social response. Both studies indicate the engagement of a fronto-parietal network in the processing of empathic social response, and the involvement of a fronto-temporal network in the processing of unempathic social response. In both studies, social cognition regions appear to play an important role in the processing of empathic and unempathic social response. The

Conflict of interest statement

The authors are not aware of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

This study was financially supported by the Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion” at Freie Universität Berlin which is funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation). We would like to thank Evelyn Schnapka for analyzing physiological data.

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