Adaptive empathy: A model for learning empathic responses based on feedback

Abstract

Empathy is usually deployed in social interactions. Nevertheless, common measures and examinations of empathy study this construct in isolation from the person in distress. In this paper we seek to extend the field of examination to include both empathizer and target in order to determine whether and how empathic responses are affected by feedback and learned through interaction. Building on computational approaches in feedback-based adaptations (e.g., no feedback, model-free and model-based learning), we propose a framework for understanding how empathic responses are learned based on feedback. In this framework, adaptive empathy, defined as the ability to adapt one’s empathic responses, is a central aspect of empathic skills, and can provide a new dimension to the evaluation and investigation of empathy. By extending existing neural models of empathy, we suggest that adaptive empathy may be mediated by interactions between the neural circuits associated with valuation, shared distress, observation-execution and mentalizing. Finally, we propose that adaptive empathy should be considered as a prominent facet of empathic capabilities with the potential to explain empathic behavior in health and in psychopathology.

Nuancing Perspective

“…Our overarching hypothesis is that gaining accurate information about previous emotions of the other person provides perceivers with a more solid basis for making correct inferences about this person’s emotions in the future. This prediction is consistent with a dynamic model of the social judgment process in which external feedback continuously shapes how people engage in subsequent social judgments (Israelashvili & Karniol, 2019; and see also Hertz & Shamay-Tsoory, 2021); it also aligns with a recent finding that people automatically generate predictions about the future mental states of others (Thornton et al, 2019). Such investigations regarding how feedback shapes accurate recognition of others’ future emotions are scarce.…”

Adaptive Empathy: Empathic Response Selection as a Dynamic, Feedback-Based Learning Process

“…Also, the empathic interaction does not necessarily end with the initial empathic response. After feedback from the target, an individual's empathic responses may change, generating a process we refer to as adaptive empathy (6). Since we focus on empathic responses which are manifested in social interactions over time, the covert empathic reactions are beyond our scope, and from now and on we will focus on overt responses only, i.e., responses that are communicated to the distressed target.…”

“…In line with the view that empathic responses are dynamic and adapted to the needs of the target, Shamay-Tsoory and Hertz (6) proposed examining empathy in the context of interactions between empathizer and target over time. Adaptive empathy is the process through which an empathizer detects the effects of his or her initial empathic response and adapts this response accordingly, i.e., learns what is the most effective response strategy.…”