Individual differences in empathy are associated with apathy-motivation

Abstract

Empathy - the capacity to understand and resonate with the experiences of other people - is considered an essential aspect of social cognition. However, although empathy is often thought to be automatic, recent theories have argued that there is a key role for motivation in modulating empathic experiences. Here we administered self-report measures of empathy and apathy-motivation to a large sample of healthy people (n = 378) to test whether people who are more empathic are also more motivated. We then sought to replicate our findings in an independent sample (n = 198) that also completed a behavioural task to measure state affective empathy and emotion recognition. Cognitive empathy was associated with higher levels of motivation generally across behavioural, social and emotional domains. In contrast, affective empathy was associated with lower levels of behavioural motivation, but higher levels of emotional motivation. Factor analyses showed that empathy and apathy are distinct constructs, but that affective empathy and emotional motivation are underpinned by the same latent factor. These results have potentially important clinical applications for disorders associated with reduced empathy and motivation as well as the understanding of these processes in healthy people.

Individual differences in emotion regulation moderate the associations between empathy and affective distress

“…The independent opposing effects of cognitive and affective empathy on affective distress are congruent with a wider literature emphasising their distinctiveness (e.g., Bird and Viding 2014 ). The results are also consistent with a recent investigation demonstrating that cognitive empathy negatively predicted behavioural apathy, while affective empathy was a positive predictor (Lockwood et al 2017 ); motivational apathy has close links with the symptoms of affective distress, and states of depression in particular.…”

Differential impact of behavioral, social, and emotional apathy on Parkinson's disease

“…Some researchers have reported that emotional facial recognition, which correlates with emotional apathy,16 is impaired in PD17, whereas others have found no impairments 18. Moreover, both intact emotional motivation8 and impaired emotional motivation have been reported albeit in a smaller sample 9.…”

Multidimensional apathy: evidence from neurodegenerative disease

“…Emotional apathy. While this is yet to be robustly investigated in neurodegenerative disease, evidence in healthy adults seems to show associations between emotional apathy and empathy [56]. Furthermore emotional recognition and processing deficits in FTD are well documented [57].…”