Greater involvement of action simulation mechanisms in emotional vs cognitive empathy

Abstract

Empathy is crucial for successful interpersonal interactions, and it is impaired in many psychiatric and neurological disorders. Action-perception matching, or action simulation mechanisms, has been suggested to facilitate empathy by supporting the simulation of perceived experience in others. However, this remains unclear, and the involvement of the action simulation circuit in cognitive empathy (the ability to adopt another’s perspective) vs emotional empathy (the capacity to share and react affectively to another’s emotional experience) has not been quantitatively compared. Presently, healthy adults completed a classic cognitive empathy task (false belief), an emotional empathy task and an action simulation button-pressing task during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Conjunction analyses revealed common recruitment of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), thought to be critical for action-perception matching, during both action simulation and emotional, but not cognitive, empathy. Furthermore, activation was significantly greater in action simulation regions in the left IFG during emotional vs cognitive empathy, and activity in this region was positively correlated with mean feeling ratings during the emotional empathy task. These findings provide evidence for greater involvement of action simulation mechanisms in emotional than cognitive empathy. Thus, the action simulation circuit may be an important target for delineating the pathophysiology of disorders featuring emotional empathy impairments.

Impact Factors of Empathy in Mainland Chinese Youth

“…Empathy has two main components, namely, emotional empathy and cognitive empathy (Cohen and Strayer, 1996;Lawrence et al, 2004;Shamay-Tsoory, 2011). Emotional empathy is an automatic procedure of sharing other's emotions (Heyes, 2018;Hua et al, 2018), while cognitive empathy is a cognitive process and is to understand other's feelings using perspective-taking (Oliver et al, 2018). Emotional and cognitive empathy represent the earlier and the later stage of empathy, respectively, and are dissociable in several aspects (Shamay-Tsoory et al, 2009).…”

“…In this study, the relative impact of inherited traits (e.g., ethnicity and Hukou) and obtained traits (e.g., study major and study grade) on empathy, and the relationship between empathy and youth wellness (e.g., depression and anxiety) were investigated with 592 Mainland Chinese undergraduate students. According to the definition of emotional empathy (Heyes, 2018;Hua et al, 2018) and cognitive empathy (Oliver et al, 2018), these two components of empathy could be more significantly impacted by inherited traits (e.g., sex) and acquired traits (e.g., study major), respectively. In the aspect of personal distress, as it has an intricate relation with both emotional empathy (e.g., López-Pérez et al, 2014) and cognitive empathy (e.g., Zhao et al, 2019), the impact of inherited and acquired traits could both be significant.…”

The Effect of High-Definition Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation of the Right Inferior Frontal Gyrus on Empathy in Healthy Individuals

“…The most widely used self-reported scale is the IRI scale (Davis, 1980 ), which measures both cognitive and emotional empathy. However, during engagement in empathic behavioral tasks, most tasks cannot measure cognitive and emotional empathy simultaneously, as they typically measured a single form of empathy like cognitive empathy (Baron-Cohen et al, 2001 ; Smith et al, 2015 ; Mai et al, 2016 ; Massey et al, 2017 ; Oliver et al, 2018 ) and emotional empathy (Derntl et al, 2012 ; Smith et al, 2014 ). To address this limitation, Dziobek et al ( 2008 ) developed a new measure of empathy, the Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET), which is designed to measure both cognitive and emotional empathy.…”

Lower- and Higher-Level Social Cognitive Factors Across Individuals With Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders and Healthy Controls: Relationship With Neurocognition and Functional Outcome

“…6 Social cognition is believed by many to include lowerand higher-level processes subserved by at least partially dissociable neural networks. [7][8][9][10] Lower-level social cognition, or "simulation," is thought to rely on embodied simulation of others' experiences, encompassing first-order mental representation, emotional empathy, and basic emotion detection. In contrast, higher-level "mentalizing" involves intention attribution and complex mental state representation.…”