Integrative neurocognitive mechanism of empathy and counter-empathy

Abstract

Empathy is an essential psychological process regarding emotional experience and social interaction. According to the observers’ emotional valence, empathy can be categorized into positive empathy—positive feelings on others’ success, and negative empathy—negative feelings on others’ misfortune. Similarly, counter-empathy refers to that observers generate opposite valence of emotional responses to others’ affective state, for example, enjoy others’ misfortune or envy others’ success. Empathy has been widely studied from diverse perspectives. However, few studies have focused on the phenomena, impact factors, psychological mechanism, and theorization of counter-empathy. In this review, we briefly summarized inducing methods and three impact factors on both empathy and counter-empathy: (i) group identity—out- group or conflict group members might elicit greater counter-empathy compared with in-group members; (ii) social comparison—comparing performance between participants and other competitors could lead them to gloat over others’ loss and envy others’ gain; (iii) perspective-taking—taking others’ perspective could decrease stereotypic bias and in- group bias, both of which usually lead to counter-empathy. Therefore, we inferred perspective-taking might be a potential way to mediate or even reverse counter-empathy. Next, we reviewed the literature on psychological mechanisms, electrophysiological indices and brain networks regarding empathy and counter-empathy. Previous theories on empathy and counter-empathy were summarized as followed: (i) the Theory of Mind—mentalizing had been proved to be the key cognitive mechanism of empathy, contributing to understand others’ and own emotional states; (ii) deservedness and social comparison—when people think others’ misfortune is deserved, they would feel a sense of schadenfreude, and when they think others’ success is undeserved, they would feel envious or angry; (iii) intergroup relation—negative attitudes towards out-group members resulted from in-group bias have evolutionary meaning but also resulted in negative effects such as discrimination, stereotyping and counter-empathy. We further proposed a unified two-dimension framework based on the observer and others’ emotional valences to systematically study and understand empathy and counter-empathy. Current literatures indicate that negative emotional valence involves larger negative feedback related negativity (FRN) and activation in brain regions such as anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and anterior insula (AI). Positive emotional valence involves smaller or no FRN and activation in brain regions such as ventral striatum (VS) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Under such an integrative framework, we predicted that brain networks of positive and negative valences would be activated in an opposite manner for empathy and counter-empathy situations. When others’ feelings are negative, empathy activates negative emotion brain networks, whereas counter-empathy activates reward brain networks; on the other hand, when others’ feelings are positive, empathy activates reward brain networks, whereas counter-empathy activates negative emotion brain networks. We proposed that future studies need to further examine the reversal mechanism of empathy and counter-empathy. Moreover, research in the future should expand to the other areas of the framework and especially fill in the gap on empathy of others’ positive affect.