Exploring the impact of awe on the multifaceted construct of empathy.

Abstract

Empathy helps us navigate social interactions and promotes prosocial behaviors like caregiving and helping. Here, we explored whether awe, a key self-transcendent and epistemic emotion, could encourage greater empathy across seven diverse student and community samples collected between 2020 and 2022. Empathy is a multifaceted construct; thus, we assessed performance on a range of empathy measures including perspective taking accuracy (Study 2), empathic accuracy (Study 3; preregistered), emotion contagion and compassion (Study 4). We also directly tested whether awe motivated people to empathize with others (Study 5; preregistered). Although dispositional awe was positively correlated with trait measures of empathy (Study 1), experimental inductions of awe did not improve performance on empathy measures or motivate people to empathize, compared to a control (Studies 2-5). However, a moderation effect emerged in which awe had divergent effects on empathy depending on participants' self-reported dispositional levels of cognitive empathy. Although effects only reached significance in two studies (Studies 3; preregistered and 4), an internal meta-analysis revealed that awe improved empathy for those high in dispositional cognitive empathy, while marginally reducing it among those low in dispositional cognitive empathy, compared to a control. These results suggest that awe may have polarizing effects on empathy depending on one's dispositional level of cognitive empathy and reveal a potentially important role of cognitive processes in linking awe and empathy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).