Activating episodic simulation increases affective empathy

Abstract

Affective empathy, feeling what others feel, is a powerful emotion that binds us to one another. Here we ask whether how we mentally represent the scene in which another suffers informs our emotions. For example, when we learn about someone suffering outside of the here and now, such as a refugee devastated by violence or famine, does a manipulation potentiating our ability to simulate the scene around the victim heighten our empathic response? Expanding recent advances in the memory literature, we investigate the link between activating our ability to imagine events—episodic simulation—and empathy for in-group and out-group members in a series of online and laboratory studies (N = 1010). Incidental manipulations of episodic simulation, unrelated in content and structure to the empathy judgment task, increased overall empathy for both in-group as well as out-group members. This relationship was mediated by participant-generated episodic detail of the victim’s surroundings.