Abstract
Empathy allows us to respond to the emotional state of another person. Considering that an empathic interaction may last beyond the initial response, learning mechanisms may be involved in dynamic adaptation of the reaction to the changing emotional state of the other person. However, traditionally, empathy is assessed through sets of isolated reactions to another's distress. Here we address this gap by focusing on adaptive empathy, defined as the ability to learn and adjust one's empathic responses based on feedback. For this purpose, we designed a novel paradigm of associative learning in which participants chose one of two empathic strategies (reappraisal or distraction) to attenuate the distress of a target person, where one strategy had a higher probability of relieving distress. After each choice, participants received feedback about the success of their chosen strategy in relieving the target person's distress, which they could use to inform their future decisions. The results show that the participants made more accurate choices in the adaptive empathy condition than in a non-social control condition, pointing to an advantage for learning from social feedback. We found a correlation between adaptive empathy and a trait measure of cognitive empathy. These findings indicate that the ability to learn about the effectiveness of empathic responses may benefit from incorporating mentalizing abilities. Our findings provide a lab-based model for studying adaptive empathy and point to the potential contribution of learning theory to enhancing our understanding of the dynamic nature of empathy.
Highlights
Empathy allows us to share emotions and understand the mental and affective states of others
Since we focus on empathic responses which are manifested in social interactions over time, the covert empathic reactions are beyond our scope, and and on we will focus on overt responses only, i.e., responses that are communicated to the distressed target
The present study investigated adaptive empathy, i.e., the way participants learned and adapted their empathic responses according to the impact of these responses on a target person and the way this learning process corresponded with trait empathy measurements
Summary
Empathy allows us to share emotions and understand the mental and affective states of others. While definitions of empathy may vary, one of the main objectives of empathic capabilities is to be able to respond to the emotional state of another person in order to alleviate that person’s distress [1]. Zaki and Williams [1] suggested that empathy is apparent in the interpersonal emotion regulation cycle, as the distressed target evokes an empathic reaction in the observer, who may help the suffering person. Empathic reactions can be covert and not communicated to others, e.g., change in mood, emotions, and thoughts, they are often overt, e.g., detectable facial or body expression, verbal response, and are conveyed back to the target.
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