Empathy predicts false belief reasoning ability: evidence from the N400

Abstract

Interpreting others' actions relies on an understanding of their current mental state. Emerging research has begun to identify a number of factors that give rise to individual differences in this ability. We report an event-related brain potential study where participants (N = 28) read contexts that described a character having a true belief (TB) or false belief (FB) about an object's location. A second sentence described where that character would look for the object. Critically, this sentence included a sentence-final noun that was either consistent or inconsistent with the character's belief. Participants also completed the Empathy Quotient questionnaire. Analysis of the N400 revealed that when the character held a TB about the object's location, the N400 waveform was more negative-going for belief inconsistent vs belief consistent critical words. However, when the character held an FB about the object's location the opposite pattern was found. Intriguingly, correlations between the N400 inconsistency effect and individuals' empathy scores showed a significant correlation for FB but not TB. This suggests that people who are high in empathy can successfully interpret events according to the character's FB, while low empathizers bias their interpretation of events to their own egocentric view.

Efficient belief tracking in adults: The role of task instruction, low-level associative processes and dispositional social functioning

“…This subscale showed the clearest pattern of associations with performance in the belief task amongst all subscales of the IRI, suggesting an association between the perspective taking ability assessed by this scale and the ability to orient attention toward the other person and take his/her visual/cognitive perspective in the belief task. These results replicate the results that EQ is associated with efficient processing of other people's belief about an object location (Ferguson et al, 2015) and extend them by showing a preferential correlation with the perspective taking sub-scale, which is an assessment of cognitive empathy. Given the size of our sample, correlational analyses should be interpreted with caution and these results should be replicated on a larger sample size.…”

“…Regarding the validity of these evidence, some authors argued that the findings could be explained without referring to mentalising, either by domaingeneral processes that are recruited by the tasks (e.g., Heyes, 2014;Phillips et al, 2015) or by the use of behavioural rules (Perner & Ruffman, 2005). Researchers are currently developing different experimental designs to address the validity issue and have started to show association between efficient belief tracking in experimental tasks and self-reported measures of empathy in everyday life (Ferguson, Cane, Douchkov, & Wright, 2015). Regarding the nature of belief processing, some authors have suggested that efficient belief tracking is a form of mentalising that differs from explicit belief reasoning (Apperly & Butterfill, 2009;De Bruin & Newen, 2012, 2014.…”

“…Participants filled in the Empathy Quotient (EQ; Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004), a global measure of empathy, and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI; Davis, 1983) that consists of four scales assessing distinct components of empathy: the perspective taking scale ''assesses the tendency to spontaneously adopt the psychological point of view of others", the fantasy scale ''taps respondent's tendency to transpose themselves imaginatively into the feelings and actions of fictitious characters in books, movies, and plays", the empathic concern scale ''assesses other-oriented feelings of sympathy and concern for unfortunate others" and the personal distress scale ''measures self-oriented feelings of personal anxiety and unease in tense interpersonal settings" (Davis, 1983). Ferguson et al (2015) showed an association between the EQ and the spontaneous computation of another person's belief in a passive reading task. In the current study, we expected that participants who reported high levels of empathy on the EQ should be more oriented toward others and less oriented toward the self.…”

Exploring the role of self/other perspective-shifting in theory of mind with behavioural and EEG measures

“…Further supporting this differentiation, recent studies on healthy adults' ToM abilities have suggested that individuals adopt an egocentric view of the world, failing to consider the perspective of another individual unless explicitly motivated to do so (e.g., Epley et al, 2004;Ferguson et al, 2015;Keysar et al, 2000). In contrast, Samson et al (2010) suggest that the mere presence of a secondary agent can influence adult's performance on a given task; for instance, using a visual perspective taking paradigm, Samson and colleagues showed that participants were slower to report the number of dots visible in a room when a secondary agent (an avatar) could not see all the dots that the participant could see.…”

Understanding Counterfactuality: A Review of Experimental Evidence for the Dual Meaning of Counterfactuals

“…Subjects' sensitivity to contextual constraints and other pragmatic abilities (e.g. Ferguson et al 2014;Nieuwland et al 2010) as well as working memory capacity (Ferguson and Cane 2015) are possible candidates.…”