Abstract
BackgroundTo navigate successfully through their complex social environment, humans need both empathic and mnemonic skills. Little is known on how these two types of psychological abilities relate to each other in humans. Although initial clinical findings suggest a positive association, systematic investigations in healthy subject samples have not yet been performed. Differentiating cognitive and affective aspects of empathy, we assumed that cognitive empathy would be positively associated with general memory performance, while affective empathy, due to enhanced other-related emotional reactions, would be related to a relative memory advantage for information of social as compared to non-social relevance.MethodsWe investigated in young healthy participants the relationship between dispositional cognitive and affective empathy, as measured by Davis’ Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 113–126, 1983), and memory formation for stimuli (numbers presented in a lottery choice task) that could be encoded in either a social (other-related) or a non-social (self-related) way within the task.ResultsCognitive empathy, specifically perspective taking, correlated with overall memory performance (regardless of encoding condition), while affective empathy, specifically empathic personal distress, predicted differential memory for socially vs. non-socially encoded information.ConclusionBoth cognitive and affective empathy are associated with memory formation, but in different ways, depending on the social nature of the memory content. These results open new and so far widely neglected avenues of psychological research on the relationship between social and cognitive skills.
Highlights
To navigate successfully through their complex social environment, humans need both empathic and mnemonic skills
Relatively little is known about answers to these questions, probably because in basic psychological research, memory and empathy have traditionally been treated as research topics belonging to different domains of psychology, i.e. cognitive psychology and social and personality psychology, respectively
We calculated for each participant the difference between memory for socially and non-socially encoded numbers as the critical dependent variable. (A positive value of this variable indicates an advantage of social over non-social memory, while a negative value indicates an advantage of non-social over social memory encoding.) This indicator of social memory advantage showed a significant positive correlation with Personal Distress (r = 0.46, p = 0.025; Figure 2b), but not with the other Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) scales (Perspective Taking, r = −0.19; Fantasy, r = 0.05; Empathic Concern, r = −0.06, all p > 0.39)
Summary
To navigate successfully through their complex social environment, humans need both empathic and mnemonic skills. Patients primarily characterized by memory deficits appear to concomitantly show reduced empathic abilities, in particular in cognitive empathy, as has been reported in dementia patients (Cuerva et al 2001; Gregory et al 2002; Zaitchik et al, 2006; Fernandez-Duque et al 2010) In these studies, patients with Alzheimer’s disease (and in the study by Fernandez-Duque et al patients with frontotemporal dementia) were assessed in tests in which they had to explicitly infer the beliefs, feelings or thoughts of another person from film material of an interview with the other person or from verbal descriptions of false belief stories. Originally developed by Perner and Wimmer (1985) in the context of developmental psychology, participants have to recognize that a target person has a different view on or state of knowledge of a scene than oneself or other persons These tests of “Theory of Mind” can be varied in difficulty, depending on the level of perspective-taking that they require. Little focus has been on the aspect of emotional empathy in these clinical studies, at least one study reported deficits in this domain in Alzheimer patients (Laisney et al, 2013), using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test by Baron-Cohen et al (2001), which requires participants to recognize the emotional state of a person form a picture that only shows the eye region of that person
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